Don Husereau: Is Canada prepared to evaluate genome-based tests?

Don Husereau, Adjunct Professor of Medicine at The University of Ottawa, shared on LinkedIn:

“Is Canada prepared to evaluate genome-based tests?

International guidance suggests effective Health Technology Assessment (HTA) needs to adopt harmonized HTA processes, which can prevent a postal code lottery where patients benefit based on where they live while also enhancing timeliness to valuable testing.

Unfortunately, Canada’s individual provinces are responsible for the delivery of genetic testing and have adopted a wide range of approaches to evaluation and this may, in part, explain inequitable access to testing.

To describe what good looks like, I teamed up with patient representative Diane Lemaire, along with genomics health services researcher wunderkind Yvonne Bombard and a group of esteemed lab leaders (Tracy Stockley, Michael Carter, Scott Davey, Erik Nohr, Paul Park, Alan Spatz, Christine Williams, Aaron Pollett, Bryan Lo, Stephen Yip, Soufiane El Hallani, and Harriet Feilotter ) from across Canada.

Following good practices and principles in HTA, along with international recommendations, we provide some helpful advice to those who might attempt to harmonize HTA processes across Canada, including provinces and territories interested in improving access to drugs through Canada’s rare disease strategy, and The Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies (CADTH) , with its renewed focus on equity in health technology.

The article has recently been published here.

It is part of a special issue in Health System Readiness for Genomic Medicine in Oncology – I encourage others to publish.

1. Garfield, S.; Polisena, J.; Spinner, D.S.; Postulka, A.; Lu, C.Y.; Tiwana, S.K.; Faulkner, E.; Poulios, N.; Zah, V.; Longacre, M. Health Technology Assessment for Molecular Diagnostics: Practices, Challenges, and Recommendations from the Medical Devices and Diagnostics Special Interest Group. Value Health 2016, 19, 577–587.”

For submission details click here.
Source: Don Husereau/LinkedIn