Importance of HTA in modern Clinical Engineering

Abstract

Despite actual significant improvements on clinical engineering management, the risks incidence on patients and users is still considerable, such as equipment failures and associated adverse events. Today it is of the upmost importance to pay attention to new ways that could offer better results, such as the multidisciplinary concept involved in Health Technology Assessment (HTA), which analyzes the technology from different perspectives.

In this way, taking into consideration the current success of HTA, the new way to avoid the increasing incidence of adverse events in medical equipment, more attention should be paid to some failures arising from the complexity, or the lack of compliance with manufacturing and maintenance standards, and also because they do not have adequately trained professionals to perform good preventive or corrective maintenance. This paper analyzes the increasing importance of ways similar to HTA or evaluation of biomedical technologies, in its clinical, technological and economic aspects, together with the analysis of factors that determine medical devices failure and how to achieve a technological surveillance and other measurement that allows reduce adverse events.