Tomorrow, Monday, November 16 at 15:00 CET (9:00 EST/6:00 PST), I will be on an ISPOR Europe Panel titled “Will COVID-19 Accelerate the Adoption of Digital Health Technologies? Perspectives on Evaluating Digital Health Technologies during Global Disease Outbreaks“. The session will be moderated by Kristian Kidholm, PhD of the University of Southern Denmark, and my co-panelists are Hans Ossebaard, of the National Health Care Institute (Zorginstituut Nederland) in the Netherlands and Maja Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark. The issue and overview are described below.
ISSUE: Digital health technologies have the potential to improve access to care, empower patients and reduce costs, particularly in a world faced with the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unclear, however, which research designs are best for measuring the value of these innovations. For pharmaceuticals and other treatments, the gold standard is a randomized controlled trial (RCT). In the world of digital, however, RCTs’ tightly prescribed protocols, long delays, and high cost may prove problematic for demonstrating real-world value. On the other hand, without robust evidence, the value of digital health innovations will remain unclear. In this issue panel, panelists will provide concrete examples of how the value of digital health innovations has been quantified through recent research, will debate the merits of different methods for quantifying the this value, and discuss how COVID-19 is changing the use and valuation of digital health technologies.
OVERVIEW: This panel will debate alternative research designs for measuring the value of digital medicine and how digital medicines are likely to evolve as more treatment interactions are conducted remotely due to COVID-19. Dr. Kidholm will provide a summary of the different types of digital health innovations in use as well as an overview of some policies used to incentivize increased uptake of digital medicine. Ms. Kjær Rasmussen will describe how her research has used an RCT approach to measure the value of telemonitoring services. Dr. Shafrin will present his research measuring the value for digital medicine technologies—including chip-in-pill adherence technologies and digital, point-of-care diagnostic tests—in cases where RCT data are not available. Dr. Ossebaard will present findings from a systematic literature review of health technology assessments for eHealth. Presentations will be approximately 8 minutes with 20 minutes for panel discussion and 10 minutes for audience questions.
Check it out!
