The 17th Event of the Vienna Evaluation Network took place on Monday, 22 February 2021, 4-5.30pm

Topic: Evaluation of eHealth – Methods, challenges, and recommendations
by guest speaker Christian Boehler (European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research)

To ensure physical distancing, VEN hosted the meeting ONLINE.

View or download the slides (PDF) here

As the relevance of eHealth in the provision of healthcare is rapidly increasing, decision-makers require information to help them find out which innovations are worthwhile. Economic evaluation of healthcare technologies may provide suitable methods to assess cost and outcomes of eHealth in a comparative fashion. However, the idiosyncrasies of eHealth may pose methodological challenges that need to be addressed adequately so to provide decision-makers with robust and useful information.

This presentation reviews current methods for the economic evaluation of eHealth and identifies methodological challenges, together with potential solutions. Based on a systematic review of the methodological literature in the field, we provide first methodological recommendations for the economic evaluation of eHealth in Austria.

Christian Boehler works as a health economist at the UN-affiliated European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research in Vienna, Austria. He has years of experience in the economic evaluation of innovative health and care technologies, and his main research interests relate to the economics of eHealth as well as active and healthy ageing.  Between 2013 and 2016, he was the principal investigator of the MAFEIP project at the European Commissions‘ Joint Research Centre (DG-JRC-IPTS) in Seville (Spain), where he was in charge of developing a Monitoring and Assessment Framework for the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing.

Christian completed his PhD in health economics at Brunel Universities’ Health Economics Research Group (HERG) in London. His thesis addressed the geographic transferability of economic evaluations for evidence-based decision making in other contexts. He is a honorary lecturer at the University of Sheffield, School of Health & Related Research/Health Economics and Decision Sciences, and he worked as an external consultant towards the NICE Single Technology Appraisal Programme.

WHEN: Monday, February 22, 2021, 4-5.30pm

WHERE: The venue was online.

This VEN event was organised with the support of the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research.

The event started with a presentation by the guest speaker. During the presentation, participants posed questions and comments in the chat function. After the presentation, participants could also ask questions.