Health NZ - Pharmac partner to evaluate new technologies

NEWS - eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

Pharmac and Health New Zealand have developed a national process for prioritising investments in medical devices and technologies. 

As part of the proposed framework, Pharmac will use its Health Technology Assessments to support a new investment pathway within Health NZ to ensure spending on hospital medical devices is targeted to where it will have the most benefit.

Robyn Whittaker, director of research, evidence, and clinical trials at Health NZ | Te Whatu Ora, and Catherine Epps, Pharmac medical devices director, presented together on the national approach at Digital Health Week NZ in December 2024.

Whittaker told attendees that a more coordinated and evidence-based system for evaluating and implementing new technologies in the public health system is necessary.

Te Whatu Ora has "a myriad of different ways of bringing in new investments, new clinical practice, and new devices across the organisation, from procurement to clinical methods to research”, but there is “no overall coordination and no plan”, she said.

To address this, a new structured framework for novel clinical practice has been proposed.

Key to this is a collation and triage point, which is a new group that would evaluate all new ideas being proposed for the system, Whittaker explained. This group would prioritise proposals based on organisational goals such as equity and cost-effectiveness.

Once this evaluation is done, the next step is evidence assessments. Some of these will be done by Whittaker’s team doing a synthesis of the evidence, while others will have a full Health Technology Assessments (HTAs) and others may need more research to provide evidence.

A new national clinical practice committee would be the next step. 

“That is the group that will look at this evidence space and make a decision around clinically, is this a good idea or not, and then it will go through an operational step,” Whittaker explained.

She said projects will still require standard business cases to gain funding, but the new framework will streamline the process as, “instead of everyone doing business cases up front, we will systematically evaluate priorities, clinical approvals, and operational feasibility before proceeding”.

Epps said Pharmac’s HTAs are part of the overarching plan and are used to evaluate health technologies, costs, benefits, and impacts to determine their value and provide guidance on their use in healthcare.

"We are setting up an interim medical devices advisory group to oversee and refine the expert advice process,” she told Digital Health Week NZ.

“The software and assessment considerations are obviously really important when we are looking at medical devices, our thinking is that software that is integrated with a device will be in scope for this work, whereas information, storage or transfer software is likely to be out of scope.”

Epps said that AI applications may fall under the HTA process, depending on their clinical use and potential regulatory changes, and that cybersecurity is also a key consideration. 

“We will continue to work with Health New Zealand to implement this national process in an ongoing and enduring way,” she said.

“We have recently commenced assessment of a range of different HTAs in collaboration with Health New Zealand to further test and refine exactly how we will do this, and we will continue to expand both this process and that of our expert advisory group.”

Image: Robyn Whittaker, director of research, evidence, and clinical trials at Health NZ | Te Whatu Ora presenting at Digital Health Week NZ 2024.

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