Hello, and welcome to the Healthcare Marketplace Specialization, Medical Technology and Evaluation course. In this course, we will discuss the elements of medical technology evaluation. In module one, medical technology assessment in the current healthcare financing and regulatory environment, we will discuss the context in which healthcare technology assessment is and can be used. This is lesson 1.1.1, Medical technology and evaluation overview. So although you've chosen to take a course in medical technology evaluation, you may not know all of the uses or reasons medical technology evaluation is important in the healthcare marketplace. This course will hopefully add context to that question. New technology development or medical technology development, whether it's new drugs or new medical devices is risky but the payoff can be huge. The companies that develop those types of technologies can be very profitable. But many of those technologies never make it to market. The uses for technology assessment can range widely and are used in many aspects of bringing a new product to market. They're used for obtaining FDA approval, determining pricing for when the device or drug is put on the market. They're also used for obtaining insurance reimbursement coverage. So not only determining the price but the technology assessments are used to ensure that insurance companies that pay the bulk of healthcare costs are actually willing to pay that price. And medical evaluations or medical technology evaluations are also used to manage costs from the other side in order to determine what is effective and what isn't and what value can be achieved from any given technology. This course is designed for a wide audience. Managers of insurance or pharmaceutical or device companies may find it useful because they often need to understand the implications of new technology on their business. Clinicians or physicians or providers may find the course useful because they're intending to develop or evaluate a new technology, either develop the new technology to bring it to market or sell it to a larger company or evaluate new technologies that are on the market and determine if they want to use them on their own patients. Entrepreneurs may be seeking a skill set that they can use to identify prospective technologies and achieve a return on their investment. Finally, financial analysts may want to use technology assessment methodology to assess the value of a new medical innovation. Besides these four examples, there are many other examples of how medical technology evaluation can be used, and hopefully that will become clear as we go through the rest of the lessons in this course. There are five main course topics. The first is the regulatory process. This includes the steps required to get a product approved for use. The second is insurance payment and reimbursement. This is the context in which medical technology or pharmaceuticals are paid for in the US healthcare environment. Third, we'll discuss research with clinical and administrative data. This is the type of data that's necessary for estimating both costs and effectiveness or benefits of new technology. We'll discuss the pros and cons, and need to understand both types of data sources. Fourth, we'll actually discuss cost effectiveness analyses and the different types and applications of these analyses. And finally, we'll discuss conducting the analyses. And in addition to actually conducting the analyses, we'll walk through a number of commonly used methodologies that are applied within technology assessments. So overall, at the end of the course you should be able to understand why technology assessments or evaluations are necessary, as well as what types of information are needed to perform them and how to perform them.