A medical device’s value is often clear to its inventor but invisible to the health service that must pay for it, and this mismatch is costing the NHS good technology that never reaches patients. The MATCH-Plus programme extends a decade-long effort to build practical tools that assess medical devices from three angles: their economic worth, the industrial process of bringing them to market, and the needs of the people who will actually use them—clinicians and patients. The Department of Health is co-funding the work because it wants these assessment methods taught to the academic and industry teams that bid for its own research programmes, such as Invention for Innovation (i4i) and Health Technology Devices (HTD). If the programme succeeds, future medical devices will be designed with user needs baked in from the start, not bolted on at the end. Economic evaluations will help innovators make a convincing case to cash-strapped NHS commissioners. The project also reserves funding to train a wider community in these techniques, and to explore international collaborations—potentially with a major US university—that could spread the approach globally. The result is a more efficient pipeline from lab bench to hospital bedside, saving the NHS money and giving patients better tools sooner.
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MATCH (Multidisciplinary Assessment of Technology Centre for Healthcare) is targeted at developing methods for assessing medical devices. This IMRC (Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre) has been running since November 2003, and has recently been funded for another 5 years to take it out to 2013. Over the first four years of its existence, it has focused on three major perspectives; economic evaluation, industrial process, and user needs. The economic piece has been in demand, particularly by the industrial partners, who need to articulate the worth of their products to healthcare systems that are increasingly focused on value for money. The industrial process research has provided a coherent framework in the form of the new product development cycle within which to understand the decisions that are made in bringing new technology to market.Because MATCH has been one of the smaller IMRCs, it has not been possible to cover all the bases with the level of activity that each merits. In particular, more effort needs to be focused on methods to address user needs. This proposal is to address that specific need, as well as to fill in some other gaps. Half of the funding is being made available by the Department of Health (DoH), which has a strong interest in stimulating better user-alignment in the development of new technology. In addition, the DoH wishes to see MATCH methods made available to the communities that will bid for its own research programmes: i4i (Invention for Innovation), NEAT (NHS Environmental Assessment Tool) and HTD (Health Technology Devices). Some funding has, therefore, been ringfenced to cover a set of conferences that will train the academic, and other bid communities, in the use of economic assessment and other evaluation techniques in relation to medical devices.Another piece of activity will be to strengthen the user needs research within MATCH. A Research Vision was submitted to the assessment panel under the MATCH renewal process and a rich research agenda has, consequently, already been agreed. This will be used to support a call that will fund a major tranche of research into user needs assessment.Smaller work-packages are also expected to be funded, with calls anticipated in such areas as linking economic assessment of medical products to supply-chain logistics, or other elements that are shown to need attention by later reviews. An exciting possibility lies in funding research that would take MATCH international, perhaps through a joint programme of work with a major US university. Again, one of the targets set in the review was to establish a truly international dimension to the research.This grant would not be possible without the main MATCH programme, which will bear the management costs and will provide the collaborations and partnerships, within which this activity can be most fruitful.
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