15th January 2020

Industry engage with Health Technology Wales to kick start 2020

We started 2020 by encouraging industry to collaborate with us in our work to increase access to non-medicine health technologies in Wales.

Over 60 industry representatives were welcomed to an event that we held in collaboration with MediWales, looking to explore the ways we can improve our assessment processes.

“In our efforts to establish a two-way flow of information with industry representatives, Health Technology Wales is taking steps to listen and learn how we can best collaborate together,” said Dr Thomas Winfield, Senior Health Economist.

“We’re really happy with today’s event, which has been an opportunity to discuss our processes through expert-led presentations and case studies. This event will help us to stay updated on industry trends and enable industry to submit topics for appraisal.”

A packed agenda at the Life Sciences Hub raised awareness of our role to support a national approach to the identification, appraisal and adoption of non-medicine health technologies.

There were talks from Professor Peter Groves, Life Sciences Hub Wales, Health and Care Research Wales, Bevan Commission, Surgical Materials Testing Laboratory and the Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee.

The morning session began with a presentation about our Industry User Group Collaboration. The group has representatives from SMEs to large multi-national companies, providing a range of perspectives to our processes.

Our new topic form is the first step of our process to produce evidence-informed Guidance for care commissioners in Wales. We demonstrated this through case studies and then our senior researchers delivered top 10 tips for submitting a topic for a Health Technology Assessment.

The afternoon session started with a focus on HealthTech Connect, the online system set up by NICE to identify health technologies as they move from inception to adoption in the UK. This has been a key part of our horizon scanning process and led to several published reports.

Dr Susan Myles, our Director, closed the event with a focus on our work to audit the adoption of our Guidance. We’ve published 12 pieces of Guidance to date and we’re working with Medical Directors in Wales to monitor the uptake by care services.

Download the slides from the HTW website here.