Customer Healthcare Horizon Scanning: Time to Lock in?

Abstract

Healthcare systems around the world are struggling with limited budgets and an escalating choice of medical technologies. At the same time, an increasingly informed public expects choice and access to new treatments. Overcoming these tensions is occupying the attention of governments in most developed countries and attempts are now being made to evaluate information about new technologies early in their development in order to help predict their effectiveness and potential impact on the healthcare system. In response to this need for information, health technology assessment agencies are developing ‘horizon scanning’ programmes in order to identify the evidence on new and emerging technologies. Much of the focus appears to be on new drugs at phases II and III and this relatively new agenda is therefore of considerable significance to the international pharmaceutical industry, not least in the area of ‘proactive knowledge management’. Medical device and diagnostic companies are not exempt and appear only latterly to be waking up to the threats posed. This paper details this growing agenda and explores some of the issues appearing. Some implications are teased out for those in marketing planning and also those in clinical and R&D, particularly as such implications relate to the introduction of new medicines. The paper also poses some difficult questions for companies to address.