MedTech-related assessments from the Scottish Health Technology Group in August 2022

In August 2022, the Scottish Health Technology Group, SHTG, released two MedTech-related technology assessments.

SHTG evaluated vCreate Neuro, an asynchronous secure video messaging service, for delivering care to adults and children with epilepsy and other neurological disorders. In the final report, SHTG concluded that vCreate Neuro may add value to the delivery of care for people (adults and children) who have epilepsy and other neurological disorders by reducing people's waiting times, more efficient triage, and improving the information available for diagnosis and treatment. In addition, vCreate Neuro may lead to resource savings for NHSScotland. Funding for vCreate Neuro has been approved for another three years, and future research work should focus on the following:

• Development of a robust effectiveness evidence base to demonstrate how using vCreate Neuro is more or equally effective in comparison to the standard of care in the UK;
• Gathering real-time resource utilization data to compare costs of epilepsy care pre and post-implementation of vCreate Neuro at NHS board and Scotland level;
• Gaining more insights about patients, carers, and clinicians who declined to use vCreate Neuro because of any reason and gathering more data on adult service users.

SHTG reported the following key findings regarding Bluetooth Tagging for tracking medical equipment:

• Published literature relating to the tagging of medical equipment was limited in quantity and quality but illustrates the potential time and resource savings that could be gained from equipment tagging compared with no tagging and manual equipment searching;
•  A cost-minimization analysis based on the pilot data concluded that using Bluetooth tagging to track medical equipment was associated with lower costs of in excess of £600,000 over five years compared with no tagging system. The results are driven by a reduction in time (and associated resource costs) spent searching for medical equipment and the value of missing assets avoided. The results are sensitive to the base case assumptions;
• There is no off-the-shelf solution available for medical equipment tracking. Boards would need to adapt current technology options to suit their local requirements and environments.

See the full details here.

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