Community Connections
Meaningful partnerships
Community Connections
The contributions of patients, clinical care providers, and those from the broader patient advocacy ecosystem are essential to all aspects of CADTH’s work.
By sharing their lived experience and expertise, we can incorporate the unique perspectives and needs of patients and clinicians into our reviews and recommendations. Driven by the desire to bring our partnership guiding principle to life, this year CADTH found new ways to engage and collaborate with some of the individuals and groups who are most impacted by our work.
Emerging tests, drugs, and digital health technologies for dementia have the potential to significantly change how the condition is diagnosed and treated. They are also likely to impact health care infrastructure, health workforce training, and reimbursement models, and raise questions around ethics, privacy, and informed consent. In anticipation of the evidence, advice, and patient input decision-makers will need in this area, CADTH convened a panel of individuals with lived dementia experience to learn from their experiences. We also hosted a roundtable discussion to gather clinician and researcher perspectives on health system readiness and barriers to delivering quality care. CADTH will use the insights from both panels for upcoming reviews and to identify emerging health technologies and topics for future work.
People with lived and living experience have firsthand knowledge, understanding, and experiences that can give context to the evidence that CADTH reviews. For a review of peer support programs for youth mental health, CADTH involved youth advisors to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of young people accessing and offering peer support. The research team also used the equity checklist for HTA as a pragmatic tool to further incorporate the consideration of health inequity throughout the research process.
This past year also saw CADTH introduce patient engagement as a standard component of our rapid health technology reviews. This means that the perspectives of a patient contributor with lived experience related to the report topic will be included when reviewing and summarizing the literature. This will help identify key gaps in the existing evidence and contextualize the conclusions with patient partner insights.
Partnering with Choosing Wisely Canada to Support Using Labs Wisely
Choosing Wisely Canada’s Using Labs Wisely program is a national consortium of hospitals committed to reducing low-value hospital-based lab testing. Last year, Choosing Wisely Canada collaborated with CADTH to examine the evidence and use expert consensus to identify at least 5 overused hospital-based lab tests for consideration for year 2 of the Using Labs Wisely program in Canada. We also developed a resource to help users estimate and quantify the magnitude of health care resources (direct and indirect) when use of the lab tests is reduced.
Choosing Wisely Canada is a leading voice of clinicians in Canada who are engaged on issues of overuse. This project furthered CADTH’s involvement with clinician leaders on matters of evidence, policy, and system design, and marks the second large-scale collaboration between our 2 organizations.
International Collaboration to Advance HTA
As the hub of HTA in Canada, CADTH has always been a strong partner to Canadian and global HTA organizations, as well as networks such as Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) and the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA). This past year, we deepened our collaboration and contributions.
CADTH’s ongoing involvement in INAHTA learning groups and HTAi interest groups ensures that we benefit from and contribute to major advances in the science of HTA. Importantly, in 2022, CADTH President and CEO Suzanne McGurn enthusiastically began her first term as a member of INAHTA’s Board of Directors.
And, in 2022, CADTH was proud to be among 6 HTA bodies from Canada, the UK, and Australia that formally partnered to boost collaboration on shared opportunities and challenges. The other organizations include the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care, Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Health Technology Wales, and All Wales Therapeutics and Toxicology Centre.