Evidence based innovation

Technological inflation increases healthcare costs. Innovation brings hope to people’s lives, but generates a never-ending debate on how to finance it.

Many healthcare innovations offer the potential for greatly improving the quality of life for patients; but more frequently than we think these innovations offer improvements that are, at best, marginal. Sometimes, innovation leads to higher quality of care at significantly lower costs, while in other cases, innovation is cost increasing. Today we demand new innovations to be effective. We need to focus more and more in efficiency as well.

Sometimes expensive new technologies or treatments can reduce the long-term use of other health care resources. We have seen a great example with AIDS treatment in the last decade. The new, expensive anti-retroviral therapy for treating AIDS patients is both effective and efficient. The increased expenditures for those drugs are much less than the savings in inpatient, outpatient, and emergency room costs.

The challenge is to effectively sort through the increasing array of healthcare innovations to develop objective scientific information so that those who make decisions—policymakers, clinicians…—can make informed choices. We need monitoring systems that foster evidence based innovation.

The ultimate goal is to ensure that we can get real value out of the money that we spend in healthcare.