AHP for Health Technology Assessment : a case study : prioritizing care approaches for patients suffering from chronic heart failure

Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is a multidimensional and multidisciplinary methodology, whose aim is to prioritize different concurrent technologies in order to support decision making in healthcare systems. A crucial point in any medical decision is to prioritize clinical, economical and patients’ needs on which decision makers base their choices. AHP can improve HTA in this critical task. In this paper, we applied HTA to assess the effectiveness and the efficacy of Home Monitoring (HM) as a model of continuity of care for patients suffering from congestive heart failure (CHF). We compare HM to other models of care: ambulatory follow-up (benchmark) and Disease Management Programs (DMP). The results lead to conclude that HM is more effective and efficient if compared to the benchmark, but seems to be not cost-effective if compared to DMPs. This conclusion changes when pervasive remote processing is applied to the monitored parameters with the aim to precociously predict critical events. In this case HM seems to be more effective and efficient than the other models of continuity of care. AHP contributed consistently in achieving these conclusions.