Designing medical technology for resilience: integrating health economics and human factors approaches

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The slow adoption of innovation into healthcare calls into question the manner of evidence generation for medical technology. This paper identifies potential reasons for this including a lack of attention to human factors, poor evaluation of economic benefits, lack of understanding of the existing healthcare system and a failure to recognise the need to generate resilient products.

Areas covered: Recognising a cross-disciplinary need to enhance evidence generation early in a technology’s life cycle, the present paper proposes a new approach that integrates human factors and health economic evaluation as part of a wider systems approach to the design of technology. This approach (Human and Economic Resilience Design for Medical Technology or HERD MedTech) supports early stages of product development and is based on the recent experiences of the National Institute for Health Research London Diagnostic Evidence Co-operative in the UK.

Expert commentary: HERD MedTech i) proposes a shift from design for usability to design for resilience, ii) aspires to reduce the need for service adaptation to technological constraints iii) ensures value of innovation at the time of product development, and iv) aims to stimulate discussion around the integration of pre- and post-market methods of assessment of medical technology.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• human factors
• risks
• health economics
• usability
• health technology assessment
• clinical pathway mapping
• clinical usefulness
• healthcare technology development
• healthcare technology value proposition

Acknowledgments

The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, the NIHR DEC or the Department of Health. For more information about NIHR-DEC of London: http://london.dec.nihr.ac.uk/. We also acknowledge that an initial conceptualisation of the HERD MedTech framework was published and presented at the Joint Conference of the European Medical and Biological Engineering Conference and the Nordic-Baltic Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics [68].

Declaration of interest

The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed. Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Diagnostic Evidence Co-operative London (DEC) at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.