La valutazione economica delle tecnologie in sanità con particolare riferimento all’area della telemedicina,

[Machine translation] Over the past few years, the progressive difficulty that governments have encountered in financing health spending, guaranteeing adequate coverage to the general population for basic health needs, has given increasing importance to the economic evaluation of health technologies. Healthcare companies are now forced to carefully evaluate each new investment in terms of costs and benefits, and it is often necessary to carry out an economic survey to quantify, in addition to expenses, also the results, which are almost always measurable in terms of improving health conditions. One type of technology that, due to its rapid spread within Italian hospitals, should be subject to these checks, is telemedicine. This term generically indicates all the possible applications of telematics to medicine, so the benefits associated with its use are multiple and vary depending on the case. In general, the resource on which you act directly and save the most is represented by work. The possibility of making images travel via cable (for example, some types of radiological tests), means that the movement of staff responsible for caring for patients is reduced to a minimum. On these occasions, the reduction in healthcare expenditure in the long term is easily calculated through a cost analysis1. On the other hand, qualitative benefits are more difficult to quantify, which mainly refer to an improvement in the quality of life of patients and their families. In the following pages, after a brief introduction to health technologies (par. 1), we move on to the definition of the most common evaluation methods (par. 2), focusing in particular on the different types of costs and benefits (par. 3). Paragraph 4 analyzes the most debated topics in the field of health technology evaluation, while paragraph 5 reports some national and international cases of evaluation of telemedicine projects.