Canada’s MEDEC Supports Government’s Digital Health Strategy
Canada’s Medical Technology Companies association said it strongly supports the Canadian government’s plans to change the country’s complex regulatory, reimbursement and procurement process for medtech.
The government’s newly unveiled roadmap to grow Canada’s medical technology provides an “unparalleled opportunity for national leadership in addressing barriers that are currently impeding the adoption of health innovation and the growth of the medtech industry,” said MEDEC’s CEO Brian Lewis.
The roadmap focuses on five areas to grow the nation’s medtech industry:
- Accelerate innovation adoption;
- Design agile regulations;
- Harness digital technology;
- Develop and attract talent; and
- Create anchor firms.
A primary barrier to adopting innovative devices is the “traditional cost-focused bulk-buy procurement approach” favored by health systems in Canada. What’s needed is a procurement approach that moves “beyond price to value,” the report said.
It recommends moving toward a value-based system similar to EU models, and it cites the example of Norway, which examined purchase price as well as failure rates and patient-reported pain in its procurement of IV catheters.
Similarly, the Netherlands established a foundation for value-based procurement in the form of a network of hospitals that is measuring patient outcomes, as well as a national registries platform for patient-reported outcomes.
Pre-market notification for devices such as is overseen by the FDA should be adopted in Canada, the report said, stressing that Canada’s “multi-tiered system” poses significant hurdles to devicemakers.
The report recommends using more joint reviews and foreign reviews for approval of devices in Canada and calls for more collaboration among provinces and territories to coordinate health technology assessments and streamline reimbursement and procurement decisions.
The government hopes to implement a national digital strategy to guide federal investments in digital health to unify provincial and territorial partners to leverage digital technology to improve care.
Canada’s single-payer health system has a number of strengths in implementing such a system, including the ability to collect patient outcome data and to facilitate information sharing among hospitals.
Although Canada has developed some electronic health record systems, what’s missing is an interoperable set of systems, a harmonized data and privacy framework and a single accessible electronic record for every Canadian patient, the report said.
Read the full report here: www.fdanews.com/10-11-18-EconomicStrategyTables.pdf.