The importance Health Technology Assessment
Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is about assessing medical technologies. These can be big, radical technologies, like different modes of surgery or transplantation, but smaller technologies as well, like lab tests or medicine. The goal of Health Technology Assessment is to deliver evidence to stakeholders, so they can make informed choices in healthcare. An important part of HTA is health economic (efficiency) research.
Goal of the MOOC HTA
The goal of the MOOC is to make knowledge and skills of HTA more accessible for different audiences than just our (international) students. A lot of stakeholders in healthcare come into contact with HTA, for instance policy developers, health insurers, hospitals, care facilities and patients. These parties often miss information about what HTA is, and what they could do with it. HTA is an important, globally needed way of delivering important information for policy and decision making about new and existing healthcare facilities. And there is no complete HTA MOOC yet, specifically aimed on using HTA in the own policy context.
Through a MOOC, our knowledge can be shared on a bigger scale. Besides, parts of the MOOC can be used in our own education traject, as a part of bachelor or master courses. Finally, the MOOC could cause more students to become interested in our Bachelor and Master programmes, like the Masters Health Economics Policy & Law (HEPL), Health Economics (HE) and the Research Master.
Learning goals of the MOOC
The following learning goals have been formulated:
- arguing that HTA is meant to make informed choices in health care, concerning access to medical products and services;
- explaining the societal consequences of choice alternatives, displayed in costs and effects
- applying methods of economical evaluation
- using a checklist, valuating a HTA-study, within decision context
Results
When the revision has finished and has been evaluated, the results will be published.