The report highlights several critical areas for improvement to ensure equitable and timely access to health technologies, including transparency, stakeholder engagement, and, importantly, reducing wait times for access to affordable medications.
ANDHealth strongly supports the recommendations including creating equitable systems for under-represented groups, improving pathways for listing medicines and vaccines, and enhancing the use of real-world data.
However, the Terms of Reference for this review of HTA policies only applied to medicines, vaccines, cell and gene therapies, and other health technologies (such as pathology tests or imaging technology) but not the wider suite of digital health products and technologies that will form part of our health system into the future.
ANDHealth will continue to advocate for the government to consider broadening its definition of health technologies to include digital health and provide increased levels of support for SMEs to access the HTA system, which in turn will enable greater access to reimbursement for Australian digital health technologies.