Health Economics and Value Proposition

Many devices that are developed are not used or do not achieve sustained uptake. This is often because any need they meet is not comparable with their financial and opportunity costs. Preliminary health economics evaluation can highlight critical gaps in current evidence and predict the likely drivers that will affect decision making required for funding and uptake into the NHS. Funders are increasingly looking for early-stage health economic work and value proposition calculations, for which industry must consider the cost of development and the required return on capital. Work conducted on the value of investment and pricing of devices will benefit companies and investors, resulting in benefits to the economy by channelling investment where it is most advantageous.

Previous work shows that failure to allow for diverse preferences in health economic models can greatly distort cost-effectiveness estimates. It is vitally important that health economic work considers equity and diversity, therefore analysis will be conducted to provide distributional breakdowns of who gains most and who bears the largest burdens by equity-relevant social variables, e.g. socioeconomic status, ethnicity and location, and disease categories.