Applying early health technology assessment in peer review: A framework for ‘a priori’ potential impact assessment of translational health research proposals

Grants from public funders are critical for biomedical innovation, yet evidence shows that much funding is wasted on research that does not change clinical practice and offers little benefit to patients. Even when innovations have potential, many fail to be adopted by health insurers because they lack strong evidence of value for patient health and cost-effectiveness. Funders increasingly ask for research impact assessments, but methods to estimate health and economic benefits early in development are not well developed.

This project will create and test a practical framework to help researchers and funding agencies estimate the potential impact of early-stage therapeutic technologies. We will focus on projects developing treatments for specific patient populations in early clinical trials.

Our work has four steps. First, we will review existing tools to identify indicators of health, economic, and societal benefits. Based on this, we will create a streamlined version of our early health technology assessment Indication Assessment Framework, enabling researchers to assess potential impact in about one day per indication. Second, we will test the framework on a sample of Canadian therapeutic projects funded between 2017 and 2019. We will evaluate whether it identifies projects with high potential impact and explore how early estimates relate to outcomes six years later, such as clinical trials, patents, or commercialization. Third, we will develop an Implementation Checklist and data template to make the framework easy to use. Finally, we will share the framework widely through webinars and video tutorials, engaging research funders.

This project is funded by the Research on Research Joint Initiative, a collaborative grant program funded by SSHRC, CIHR, and Michael Smith Health Research BC. It will be conducted by the University of British Columbia early health technology assessment team. The team will be led by Dr. Mark Harrison and Dr. Larry Lynd, who specialize in adapting methods from health economics, epidemiology, and health technology assessment to support development of new health care technologies like drugs.