In July 2023, Dutch Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) awarded 13 projects under the 2024 Round of the Efficiency Research program, including four projects in surgery, two projects for imaging diagnostics and one project on the AI-based algorithms in emergency settings.

In August 2023, the UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC) announced that the annual call for new topics is rescheduled. The next call will open from July 1 to September 30, 2024, and there will be no annual call in 2023. During the call, stakeholders can propose potential new screening programs or new technologies not yet considered by the UK NSC.

Market access is a challenging field. Multiple priorities have to be managed within a limited budget. We would like to share the anonymized outlines of the projects in the HEOR and market access fields commissioned to MTRC to inspire our clients. The first example is the evidence gap analysis and evidence generation strategy.

On August 11, 2024, the BfArM (Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices) published the preliminary version of the 2024 OPS procedure coding classification. The OPS, together with the ICD-10-GM (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th revision, German Modification), forms the basis for the reimbursement systems in inpatient and outpatient care in Germany.

MTRC shares the most relevant and impactful publications in the field of market access and HEOR for medical technologies in Europe through its Publications Digest. In a recent publication, Edgar et al. introduced Performance Outcome assessments as a valuable tool that indirectly assesses the meaningful aspects of health for evaluating the clinical benefit of therapeutic interventions. These assessments involve standardized tasks actively undertaken by patients, reflecting their various important functional skills, especially when self-report is limited, or heterogeneity is a concern. However, the authors underscored the importance of adhering to established good practice recommendations for other clinical outcome assessment types, which remain directly applicable.

In August 2023, the 2023-2028 strategy for the “New Methods” framework was published. The strategy defines the most important objectives for further improvement of the framework over the next five years, including the development of appropriate processes and prioritization criteria for medical devices and procedures.

On August 10, 2023, the Clinical Coding and Schedule Development (CCSD) working group, which develops and maintains procedural and diagnostics nomenclatures for private payers in England, published Bulletins 191 and 087 with changes to be implemented no later than October 6, 2023. Five new procedure codes (concerning urogynecology, robotic surgery, and neuromodulation) and six new codes for in-vitro diagnostics were introduced.

In August 2023, the Danish Health Technology Council (Behandlingsråd) decided to conduct evaluations based on completed health technology assessments (HTA) from other countries, adopting their results to the Danish context. This evaluation method will be introduced in addition to the currently used. The Council has already selected the first four HTAs for evaluation.

The Essential Levels of Care defines outpatient specialist care and prosthetic care guaranteed to the Italian population. Although the LEA document was brought in 2017, the national tariffs for outpatient specialist and prosthetic care were approved in April 2023. The tariffs for the 2017 LEA catalog (to be in use from January 2024) were updated with the Decree of the Ministry of Health published in the Official Gazette on 4 August 2023

MTRC shares the most relevant and impactful publications in the field of market access and HEOR for medical technologies in Europe through its Publications Digest. In a recent publication, Manetti et al. developed a novel framework for assessing readiness in successful Medical Device (MD) development and deployment. Through a four-stage process, the authors developed and validated checklists for both small (21 items) and large (15 items) enterprises. The study identified three key drivers of MD success: R&D assessment strategy, device-outcome measures, and company profiling. Additional retrospective validation with 40 case studies on MDs highlighted the crucial role of early Health Technology Assessment in industry success, varying by enterprise size.

In August 2023, the Basque Office for Health Technology Assessment (OSTEBA) is working on several HTAs, including the evaluations in the cardiovascular, diagnostic imaging, e-health, ENT, ICU/OR, nephrology and urology, IVD, neurovascular, obstetrics and gynecology, surgical procedures, and some other fields.

In June 2023, one assessment was published by the Scottish Health Technologies Group (SHTG) concerning the review of clinical and cost-effectiveness evidence for a digital type 2 diabetes remission program in Scotland. Furthermore, six assessments are currently in development.