Technology foresight for medical device development through hybrid simulation: The ProHTA Project

“Prospective Health Technology Assessment” (ProHTA) aims to develop a platform targeting health care manufacturers and decision makers that facilitates the assessment of innovative health technologies prior to their launch. The simulation has been run for the first case study of Mobile Stroke Units (MSUs). In the highly time sensitive setting of acute stroke, MSUs are an innovative approach as they aim to reduce ‘time-to-thrombolysis’. The ProHTA approach focuses on interdisciplinary work related to forecasting with hybrid simulation consisting of system dynamics models for macro-simulation and agent-based models for micro-simulation. Results of the simulation show that MSUs save up to 49 min of time between ambulance call and therapy decision. Whereas without MSUs, only 0.2% of patients fall in the group with the most favourable time interval between 0 and 90 min, up to 16.6% of patients treated in MSUs fall into this group of early onset times to thrombolysis. As a flexible and primarily quantitative decision-making tool for foresight, ProHTA adds value to existing methodologies for pre-assessing health technology at a very early stage of technology research and development. With its emphasis on strategic planning, ProHTA helps to improve the efficiency of health care delivery in different settings using hybrid simulation techniques.