Alexandria, VA – August 22 – The Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI), a non-profit research organization committed to advancing the science, practice, and use of value assessment in health care, today announced the findings from the Patient-Engaged Health Technology Assessment Strategy – Feasibility Assessment and Recommendations, a collaboration with RAND Health Care that identifies novel methods for engaging patients in health care valuation.

“We are building upon proven methods and practice in clinical decision-making and health technology assessment (HTA) from around the world. We tested the feasibility of a novel approach to enable people with relevant lived experience, their families, and caregivers to directly participate in determining treatment value. No longer is it only about researchers, health economists, and regulators involved in these decisions. This approach enriches the information used to inform HTA methods and ensures the decisions that affect individuals and society reflect what ultimately matters to patients,” stated Richard Xie, PhD, Director of Research, IVI.

Incorporating outcomes that are important to patients into research and health care is a core principle of patient-centered medicine (Epstein & Street, 2011; Frank, Basch, Selby, & Institute, 2014). Traditionally, however, patient=centered principles did not align with methods in health research (Garrison, Jansen, Devlin & Griffin, 2019; Perfetto, 2018). Also, we have often lacked a standard approach to identify and quantify outcomes that are important to patients in a way that would make a substantial impact on their treatment and care.

“We wanted to put a rigorous method for collecting patient goals for their care into practice. Patients rated the importance of a set of goals in a standardized way and wrote in additional goals that mattered to them, often highlighting goals that are not part of traditional clinical trials. We hope that policymakers and regulators see methods like this as a way to systematically incorporate the patient voice into HTA and other value assessments,” noted Zachary Predmore, PhD, Associate Policy Researcher, RAND Health Care.

The findings and recommendations for novel methods for engaging patients in health care valuation, include:

  • Goals relevant for disease management, and treatment evaluation and comparison can be efficiently identified and rated for importance by a patient population.
  • Collected patient-important goals and importance ratings can be incorporated into deliberative methods such as multi-criteria decision analysis to inform the evaluations of health technologies.
  • The proposed approach invites active direct participation from patients with lived experience in the deliberative process to inform HTA and has the potential to ensure more patient-centered insights and decisions.

Read the full report to learn more: Findings, Patient-Engaged Health Technology Assessment Strategy – Feasibility Assessment and Recommendation.

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About IVI
The Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit research organization dedicated to advancing the science and improving the practice of value assessment through the development of novel methods and the creation and application of enhanced value assessment models to support local decision-making needs in healthcare.