Digital Health Value Assessment - A New Frontier

It is well known that Digital Health (DH) can have many positive impacts on patients and other healthcare stakeholders, but it is also not without its costs and potential harms. DH Technologies (DHTs) are also much more complex than their “analogue equivalents” in several cases - for example when talking about digital therapeutics versus traditional drugs. This makes the challenge of measuring costs and benefits across multiple levels, from the individual to the societal, much more complex for the field of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) than for traditional “technologies.” In this work, we examine some of the traditional HTA approaches and how they do and do not handle the complexities of DHTs. We propose that key aspects of DHTs and their implementation are not well handled by these traditional approaches, and we outline new thinking and approaches that may help address this foundational challenge facing the future of DH, and that we hope will underpin robust and sustainable policy in this area.