European 2 Million Euro Grant to CERGAS
The European Commission, DG Research & Innovation, has decided to finance with a € 2 million grant MedtecHTA (Methods for Health Technology Assessment of Medical Devices: A European Perspective), a research project coordinated by Rosanna Tarricone and Aleksandra Torbica (CERGAS and Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management) and involving scholars from Universitaet Hamburg, University of York, University of Exeter Medical School, UMIT (University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology), Institut za Ekonomska Raziskovanja and Société Européenne de Cardiologie.
The grant has been assigned by the programme Cooperation, theme Health, of the 7th Framework Programme. The research will last 36 months, with the provision of more than 280 person-months of scientific research.
"I'm exceedingly happy about this result", Tarricone said, "which comes as a prize to our 4-year long effort to design a research project both scientifically rigorous and practically useful to a plurality of stakeholders such as policy makers, Health Technology Assessment (HTA) agencies, healthcare providers, medical device industry, patients and the scientific community".
MedtecHTA's objective is to identify improvements of HTA methods by making evaluation of medical devices more comprehensive and by acknowledging complexities rising from their integration into clinical practice. To date, HTA methods are well established for pharmaceuticals, but don't fully encounter the challenges rising from intrinsic differences between different types of health technologies, and in particular medical devices. Tarricone and her colleagues aim at developing the emerging framework into a tool that provides structured, evidence based input into health policies.