ISSUE:

Innovative products often come with a hefty price tag as the research and development process requires a huge amount of investment and resources. How can we motivate potential innovators of healthcare technologies to innovate and manufacture products that help to advance health? Can we incentivize innovation through premium reimbursement? If yes, how? If no, why?

OVERVIEW:

Objectives: Understand the importance of incentivizing medical technology innovation with premium reimbursement; Understand the methodologies, with case studies, to guide the framework of differentiated reimbursement

Dr Ma will kick off the session by sharing the importance of incentivizing innovation and how reimbursement remains an important lever. [10 minutes]

Prof Xiao will discuss the key considerations and challenges in evaluating innovative health technologies, especially those unique to Asia Pacific. She will share an example where incremental technical/functional benefits of a device led to clinical/economic/operational improvement. [10 minutes]

A/Prof Igarashi will discuss the various methodologies used in evaluating innovative products and share a case study on how innovative medical devices can be evaluated. [10 minutes]

Prof Ahn will share examples on how innovative medical devices are evaluated under the new health technology assessment and medical device reimbursement process in Korea and discuss how other countries can learn from these examples. [10 minutes]

Dr Ma will engage the panelists in a discussion around how evaluation should recognize incremental innovation that leads to improvements other than clinical outcomes. The session will end with recommendations to policy makers and a call for action to develop a guiding framework for evaluating and according differentiated reimbursement for innovative technologies. [20 minutes]