Our Impact

The second feature of the new website that we would like to introduce is the ‘Our Impact’ section of the site – which focuses on country specific work that ranges from developing quality standards to building capacity for health technology assessments.

Use the interactive map to explore the in-country projects that we are supporting – clicking on the country will take you to a page that highlights what work is being conducted and who we are partnering with to enable better healthcare decisions.

Click on South Africa and you will see we are working with our core partner PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons for System Strengthening South Africa) a research unit based at Wits University School of Public Health, to develop capacity to undertake and use evidence provided by Health Technology Assessments to better inform government decisions on healthcare.

We’ve been working in South-East Asia for a number of years to bring about improvements to healthcare systems and policies. iDSI core partner HITAP (Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Programme) who are based in Thailand lead on much of this work. Our involvement in Vietnam has helped to to embed HTA evidence into designing a safer public health care system, and to improve hospital quality in key disease areas.

“The collaboration with iDSI has led to policy change and has been of great value to us in Vietnam. I appreciate the commitment shown by iDSI in supporting Vietnam to use evidence to inform decision-making in health.”

– Prof Pham Le Tuan, Vice Minister of Health in Vietnam

Find out more about our work in low and middle income countries by exploring the map here.

iDSI Knowledge Gateway

You can also search the iDSI Knowledge Gateway for specific country work using the ‘country focus’ search filter. For example you can view the documents related to our work in Thailand here. The iDSI Knowledge Gateway is an Open Access platform: providing decision makers within health on a global scale with free access to the tools and information they need to make better informed decisions to improve healthcare.

Stay up to date as we post about more of the new features on the website: follow us at @idsihealth and sign up for our newsletter using the form in the right hand side bar.

Throughout this week we will be posting blogs that highlight new features of the website, starting with our six key themes:

• Tackling healthcare challenges
• Strengthening health systems and institutions
• Generating and using evidence
• Smart purchasing for UHC
• Value for money for sustainable development
• Measuring impact

Our key themes represent iDSI’s approach and principles in supporting low and middle income countries to make better informed decisions about their healthcare spending and policies. By publishing both our technical content and blog posts under a key theme we hope to present our work in an organised and discoverable manner.

The six key themes are introduced under the ‘What we do’ section of the site, with a summary introducing the theme. Related posts are displayed under a drop-down box.

iDSI Knowledge Gateway

In addition to our website we are proud to introduce the iDSI Knowledge Gateway. We have moved all of our technical documents and knowledge products to a new space on the F1000Research website, under the same six key themes. F1000Research are an Open Access publisher and services provider for the life sciences community – the perfect place to host our outputs so they can be easily discovered and accessed by those looking for technical support to inform decisions made within healthcare.

Browse our content on the iDSI Knowledge Gateway here: https://f1000research.com/gateways/iDSI and share with your colleagues!

Stay up to date as we post about more of the new features on the website: follow us at @idsihealth and sign up for our newsletter using the form in the right hand side bar.

The NHS is doing more harm than good by approving expensive drugs for a limited number of conditions such as advanced cancer, which use up funds that would benefit other parts of the health service…

Claxton says the patients who lose out are invisible and have no say in the argument over how limited NHS resources are spent – by contrast patients with conditions such as advanced cancer are often featured in the media whenever a new drug with a very expensive price tag is turned down by Nice.

The full report by Claxton et al. is published in the NIHR Health Technology Assessment journal.

And here is the full response from the ‘decision maker’, Sir Andrew Dillon, Chief Executive of NICE:

At the other end of the spectrum, we obviously can’t just say yes to anything and everything… Whether we’ve got the balance right is a question for everyone to reflect on; it’s certainly not a decision just to be left to health economists.

Whether or not the current threshold is indeed to high, and whether or not NICE is ever able to adopt this suggested dramatically lower threshold, this debate highlights very important issues about the real opportunity costs of paying for expensive health technologies; the invisible patient who suffers and never has a voice; who should decide the rules (and how); and, fundamentally, the importance of having robust, defensible mechanisms of health technology assessment, so that society is informed as to what we are paying for, and at what cost.

It is commendable that the technical experts and decision makers are able to have this honest, open discussion about what the threshold should be. Further, it demonstrates the very principles which crucially underpin the work of NICE: transparency, participation (in particular, a collaborative and productive relationship between decision makers and an independent academic network), and weighing scientific evidence in the context of social and ethical values, for the broader interests of society.

As part of iDSI, our colleagues at the University of York are also leading research to explore the use of cost-effectiveness thresholds in low- and middle-income countries.

It might be new and expensive cancer drugs in the UK, or high-tech viral load monitoring for HIV in Uganda, but reality is the same everywhere: each pound or dollar spent on one part of the health system, means denying that pound or dollar from being spent on something and someone else.

With thanks to Yot Teerawattananon, and Kalipso Chalkidou

The Methods for Economic Evaluation Project (MEEP) was established by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2013 to improve the quality and transparency of economic evaluation and to guide researchers in undertaking and reporting well-conducted and robust analyses.

MEEP was a novel collaboration led by NICE International and included partners from institutions around the world including the Health Intervention and Technology Appraisal Program (Thailand), the University of York, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the University of Glasgow.

A key output of MEEP was the production of the Gates Reference Case, a set of principles, methodological specifications and reporting standards to support health economic evaluations funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Senior academics, donors and policy makers attended the launch at the Houses of Parliament, followed by a technical workshop to discuss why and how the Gates Reference Case was developed; what it means for researchers, donors, and policy makers working in low and middle income countries; and next steps in the development and implementation of the reference case.

The MEEP final report contains the full Gates Reference Case and background to the project, download here:

Methods for Economic Evaluation Project (MEEP): final report 

Methods for Economic Evaluation Project (MEEP): appendices