ECRI Institute Identifies 1,000 Interventions for AHRQ Healthcare Horizon Scanning System

Reports available for free on AHRQ's Effective Health Care Website

PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa., June 1, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Nearly 1,000 new and emerging healthcare technologies and services have been identified as having potential to address an unmet patient need during the first year of healthcare horizon scanning conducted by ECRI Institute on behalf of the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). ECRI Institute, an independent nonprofit that researches the best approaches to improving patient care, was selected by the Agency in September 2010 to develop, implement, and maintain the nation's first Healthcare Horizon Scanning System. 

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These interventions, which cut across scores of diseases and conditions, are described in newly published reports that are free and available to the public on AHRQ's Effective Health Care website. One report, Horizon Scanning Status Update, is a compendium of the topics being tracked in the system and includes a short description of each technology or service detailing the unmet need, potential patient population, intervention, developer, phase of development, comparators, and potential health impacts. The Potential High Impact Reports discuss topics within each priority condition that may have potential for high impact based on comments and opinions of various experts with clinical, health systems, health administration, and/or research backgrounds.

"The horizon scanning system is intended to help inform AHRQ's deliberations for allocating resources for patient-centered outcomes research," says ECRI Institute's Karen Schoelles, MD, SM, project director for the Healthcare Horizon Scanning System. "Other groups engaging in comparative effectiveness research may also find these resources useful to identify potential comparators or even technologies or procedures in development that might disrupt current treatment paradigms," adds Schoelles.

As the nation's first and only initiative of its kind, the Healthcare Horizon Scanning System is a multi-year project designed to provide a comprehensive, systematic, transparent process for identifying, tracking, and monitoring new healthcare interventions and technologies across 14 priority areas identified by AHRQ. These priority areas include arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, dementia, depression, developmental delays, diabetes, functional limitations, infectious disease, obesity, peptic ulcer disease, pregnancy, pulmonary disease, and substance abuse. ECRI Institute also added a "cross-cutting" area to track interventions that impact more than 1 of the 14 priority areas identified by AHRQ.

Since December 2010, more than 10,000 leads have been uploaded into the system for consideration, and about 1,400 topics have been identified and moved through the system, according to the procedures outlined in the protocol. Topics in the system must be in development for humans and intended for use in the U.S. healthcare system. Topics that meet criteria for inclusion in the Horizon Scanning System are tracked not only while interventions are in development, but up to 2 years after initial diffusion/commercial availability in the United States.

The criteria and process for identifying interventions to be tracked in the AHRQ Healthcare Horizon Scanning System are described in detail in the Horizon Scanning Protocol and Operations Manual.

An unmet need may arise from a gap in effective ways to screen, diagnose, treat, monitor, manage, or provide or deliver care for a health condition or disease. Interventions might be lacking entirely (e.g., treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy) or existing options might be less than optimal. Unmet need also arises from conditions for which significant barriers exist to obtaining effective care, such as heart transplantation, or conditions for which availability of certain treatments is limited by location, access, or cultural or ethnic barriers that could cause health disparities.

In the just-published Horizon Scanning Status Update report, five priority areas comprise about 76% of the interventions (including programs) being tracked. Interventions related to cancer account for 30% of identified and monitored topics. Other areas in descending order of number of topics being tracked are in the priority areas of functional limitations and disability (18%), cardiovascular diseases (11%), infectious diseases (11%), and diabetes (6%). Interventions being tracked in the remaining eight priority conditions (arthritis; dementia; depression and other mental illness; obesity; peptic ulcer disease and dyspepsia; pregnancy and childbirth; pulmonary diseases; substance abuse) account for 4% or less each, or a combined total of almost 24% of the interventions being tracked in the system.

"Overall, more than 84% of topics in the system fall into one of four general categories," notes program manager Diane Robertson. "About 62% are a pharmaceutical/biotechnology; about 14% are devices—either implanted or used to deliver treatments externally; about 5% are technologies intended to screen, diagnose, and/or monitor a disease state; and about 3% are programs/services/care-delivery innovations." 

The most recent Potential High Impact Reports include 108 topics that are expected to have potential for high impact in the 14 priority areas and a cross-cutting category. The determination of potential impact is made using a systematic process of gathering opinions and impressions about potential impact from a variety of experts. Perspectives of an expert with a conflict of interest (COI) are balanced by perspectives of experts without COIs. No more than two experts with a possible COI are considered out of a total of the seven or eight experts who are sought to provide comment for each topic.

Future reports that AHRQ intends to publish in the coming months include the following:

• Topic Profiles present detailed information on the interventions approaching diffusion into practice. These reports identify and examine factors that are likely to influence the potential for diffusion and future use of the health care technology or innovation. Draft Topic Profiles are shared with a variety of experts with clinical, health system, health administration, and/or research backgrounds for comment and opinions about potential for impact. The comments and opinions received are then considered and synthesized by ECRI Institute to identify those interventions that experts deem, through the comment process, to have potential for high impact.
• A Systematic Review of evidence on methods for horizon scanning employed by other entities.

ECRI Institute selected certain collaborators for the project. They include Emerson Consultants, Inc.; Mathematica Policy Research Inc.; Provider Resources, Inc.; and Thomson Reuters (Healthcare), Inc.

For more information, visit www.ecri.org or contact ECRI Institute by mail at 5200 Butler Pike, Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462-1298, USA; by telephone at +1 (610) 825-6000; by fax at +1 (610) 834-1275; or by e-mail at [email protected].

About ECRI Institute
ECRI Institute, a nonprofit organization, dedicates itself to bringing the discipline of applied scientific research to healthcare to discover which medical procedures, devices, drugs, and processes are best to enable improved patient care. As pioneers in this science for nearly 45 years, ECRI Institute marries experience and independence with the objectivity of evidence-based research. Strict conflict-of-interest guidelines ensure objectivity. ECRI Institute is designated an Evidence-based Practice Center by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. ECRI Institute PSO is listed as a federally certified Patient Safety Organization by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Find ECRI Institute on Facebook (www.facebook.com/ECRIInstitute) and on Twitter (www.twitter.com/ECRI_Institute). For more information, visit https://www.ecri.org. 

SOURCE ECRI Institute