Health technology assessment as a tool for medical devices management in hospitals

HTA has been used much less in case of medical devices than drugs or therapeutic interventions. It was shown that the problem - difficulties in evaluation of (patient-reported) quality of life - appears above all when appraising diagnostic devices, while the therapeutic ones can be assessed as a part of the entire intervention. The idea of multiple-criteria analytic methods utilization brought in some progress. In the last years, HTA methods are more and more used also on a hospital level. This approach, called hospital-based HTA, has different objectives and employs different methods than the traditional HTA. In hospitals, HTA methods are usually applied to strategic decisions, device procurement and management, and general organizational issues. Recently, medical devices became the main field, where hospital-based HTA proved beneficial. The paper summarizes different attitudes to HTA implementation on a hospital level. Typical applications in device selection and procurement, intra-hospital organization, and/or strategic decisions are shown.