New guidelines on costing healthcare treatments have been published by the Health Information and Quality Authority.

Applying the guidelines will provide a more complete and accurate picture of the cost of health technologies and will support financial planning, resource allocation, and decision making in the publicly funded health and social care services.

Speaking at the launch, HIQA’s Director of Health Technology Assessment (HTA), Dr Máirín Ryan, said: “The budget impact analysis guidelines will help ensure that more accurate cost predictions are available. They will provide the people who have to make these hard decisions with the best possible information. The Authority believes that the guidelines are vitally important to help deliver a better quality service to the public.

“In the current economic climate, HTA will play a valuable public-interest role. Budget impact analysis helps to predict how adopting a new technology for a given condition will impact on the overall expenditure for that condition. BIA represents a service-planning tool and can be used to inform decisions regarding the affordability of new treatments and on how resources can be used most effectively.”

The new Guidelines for the Budget Impact Analysis of Health Technologies in Ireland urge transparency in how BIA is carried out in Ireland, and they outline the best way to conduct the analysis.

The guidelines provide a BIA model that can be applied across the Irish health system to ensure best use of resources, which in the present economic environment has taken on a more important significance.

“The guidelines outline the best way to provide a transparent and reproducible BIA model that includes all relevant costs and scenarios, so that findings are representative of differences between technologies as opposed to differences in how they were assessed.

“The goal of the BIA guidelines is to ensure that the resources available to the Irish healthcare system can be used in the best way possible to improve, promote and protect the health and welfare of the public,” Dr Ryan commented.

Further Information: 

Marty Whelan, Head of Communications and Stakeholder Engagement
01 8147481 / 086 2447623
mwhelan@hiqa.ie

Notes to the Editor: 

• The BIA guidance is the second in a series of HTA guidelines being published by the Authority. They aim to ensure that healthcare interventions used in Ireland work for patients, are affordable, and are good value for money. The first of these guidelines, the economic evaluation guidelines, were published by HIQA earlier this month and addressed both the cost of such technologies and the health benefits associated with them.
• ‘Economic evaluation’ refers to an analysis that evaluates the costs and consequences of heath technologies. In contrast, ‘budget impact analysis’ (BIA) has been defined as a tool to predict the potential additional financial impact of the use of a new technology in a healthcare system with finite resources.
• The purpose of the Guidelines for the Budget Impact Analysis of Health Technologies in Ireland is to assist those conducting or using BIA as part of health technology assessment (HTA) in Ireland. The overall objective is to produce HTAs that provide decision makers with information that is useful, relevant and timely.
• The guidelines will apply to HTA being conducted by, or on behalf of the Health Information and Quality Authority, the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics, the Department of Health and Children, and the Health Service Executive (HSE), on all healthcare treatments, including medications, procedures, medical devices, and broader public health initiatives. They are relevant to the assessment of both new and existing healthcare technologies.
• It is recognised that the findings of any such HTA will have implications for patient groups, the public, clinicians, independent healthcare providers, academic groups and the manufacturing industry, as well as the publicly funded healthcare system.
• The BIA guidelines have been developed by the Authority with technical input from the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics and in consultation with the Authority’s (HTA) Scientific Advisory Group, and following a targeted consultation with key stakeholders.
• The BIA guidelines have been approved by the Board of the Authority and have been submitted to the Minister for Health and Children for her consideration. The guidance is the second section of a series of documents. The Authority will be developing other related documents that will include guidelines on the social, ethical and organisational aspects of HTA.