As it celebrates its 25th year, the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies (AMCHSS), the Health Sciences wing of the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST) and an institution that has made a career in public health a high profile affair, is preparing to take up yet another key assignment.
The Department of Health Research (DHR), a part of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), has sanctioned a three-year project to the AMCHSS to develop a regional Technical Resource Centre for Health Technology Assessment (HTA).
The AMCHSS is one of the six chosen centres in the country to be resource hubs for HTA, to help the Centre and Sate governments with key policy decisions on the social, economic or ethical dimensions of new health interventions or technology.
As a TRC, developing skilled human resources in this emerging discipline of HTA will also be the one of the mandates of the AMCHSS.
Importance of HTA
As nations move towards Universal Health Coverage, the importance of evidence-based policies when it comes to judicious resource allocation or the introduction of expensive medicines, medical devices or procedures, have become all the more important.
“HTA is a multidisciplinary process to evaluate and generate evidence on various dimensions — benefit, safety, cost effectiveness and clinical efficiency — of a health intervention (eg: a new vaccine) or a new technology, so that governments can be helped with policy decisions or to prioritise health sector resources. We have just started the process of new skills recruitment to form a multidisciplinary HTA technical team,” said V. Ramankutty, Director of AMCHSS.
The State Health Department has set up a technical group on HTA and discussions have been initiated with policy makers on some key concerns of the State.
“One of the issues that came up was regarding the guidelines/cost-effectiveness of community-level screening for non- communicable diseases. Another was the increasing demand to subsidise certain new generation cancer drugs, the cost effectiveness of which are suspect,” Dr. Ramankutty said.
HTA is essentially the systematic review of literature, looking at current clinical evidence and synthesising it to generate evidence. There are definite methodologies, computational skills and modelling involved, which will help the technical team arrive at decisions.
“The biggest challenge we are now facing is getting people with the right kind of skills to form our technical team. We need economists, statisticians and those with new and varied skills to make up that team,” he added.
