Grant: Operating Grant

New and innovative health technologies (e.g., surgical devices, imaging or laboratory diagnostics, etc.) offer opportunities to improve health, but typically at increased cost. Health policy makers usually focus on the challenges this creates for hospitals and other health care organizations, which face growing demand with limited resources. From the perspective of industrial policy, however, the development and sale of innovative health technologies can contribute to economic growth and employment. Increasingly, therefore, health policy makers are being asked to consider both sets of policy objectives, and to think about how the purchasing practices of health care organizations might be used to improve the health technology innovation system - to build health-improving and cost-reducing health technologies and profitable health technology industries, over the long term. Very little is currently known about how hospitals and other health care organizations purchase innovative health technologies. Thus, a first step for this study is to describe these arrangements, to find out what kinds of organizations are involved, and how evidence of the clinical effects and costs of technologies are considered, alongside other factors. This also allows us to understand why these arrangements exist - who supports them and why, and what types of policies influence them. Taken together with existing knowledge and theory, evidence from this study can identify the policy options that exist, and their applicability in the Canadian context, and support more informed discussion and consideration of what we might be able to achieve through careful use of the buying power of healthcare systems in Canada, and what conflicts and compromises might arise as a result.