A key concern for Health technology engineers and healthcare managers is how to leverage the opportunities offered by new medical and digital technologies to create products and solutions that improve the quality of life for people. Decision-makers, professionals and citizens have shown a burgeoning interest in developing effective approaches to manage these emerging opportunities and challenges. The Impact Assessment of technologies is therefore particularly urgent for the health care community since there is an overwhelming range of programmes and initiatives dedicated to health care innovations in different contexts (hospital-based, home-based and wearable technologies). Despite their undoubted relevance, these initiatives are fragmented in terms of terminology and underlying assumptions. Technologies for health and health care, no matter how novel or mature, are always embedded in complex socio-technical systems and immersed in dense networks of relations among different stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem which adds further complexity that should be managed; and even a cursory review suggests that the question of their implementation resonates strongly with current debates about Value-Based Health Care (VBHC). Nevertheless, in common practice, there is a general lack of measurement systems, indicators and methodologies to support the effective assessment of the technology.

The student/s working on this thesis will examine the process by which policymakers, payers, providers and citizens converge and agree about what constitutes ‘value’ in the context of specific technology adoption decisions, and how actors are held accountable for their capacity to measure value to support methodological advances in health technology assessment. This objective will be achieved by identifying the main factors to be included through literature analysis and subsequent validation via case study implementation. This will also allow identifying reasons that affect the effectiveness of medical technology usage and adoption.