Knowing what helps: “Topic check medicine” starts at IQWiG

Receiving reliable medical support normally isn’t difficult in Germany. However, not all questions about medical examination and treatment methods have already been answered. Patients or their relatives are also repeatedly confronted with open issues that should undergo a scientific assessment.

On IQWiG’s new website "ThemenCheck Medizin" (“Topic check medicine“ ) members of the public can now at any time submit their proposals for scientific assessments of medical examination and treatment methods. (Please note: the website is only available in German.)

IQWiG collects these proposals and in a 2-step selection procedure determines up to 5 topics per year for assessment. In this context, the consumer and patient perspective as well as the scientific perspective are considered, resulting in scientific assessments of medical interventions and technologies (health technology assessment, HTA), which are published as HTA reports.

Questions about benefit or harm and potential effects

Both examination and treatment methods can be investigated as topics in HTA reports. HTA reports should answer questions such as: What advantages and disadvantages does an intervention have for patients? Is it better than previous interventions? What are the associated costs? Do ethical or legal aspects need to be considered? Does an intervention have a potential societal impact?

HTA reports provide answers

IQWiG searches for the scientific literature on the questions posed by members of the public. Teams of external researchers summarize and assess the research results, which are published together with recommendations for action in IQWiG’s “Topic check medicine”.  The publication is supplemented by a publisher’s comment from IQWiG.

The HTA reports are also sent to institutions in Germany which, for example, make decisions on the services and structure of the German healthcare system. In this way the results of the HTA reports are supposed to have a direct impact on patient care in Germany, for example, on treatment decisions made in doctor-patient conversations or on system decisions made by the self-government of the healthcare system and by policy makers.

From proposal to HTA report

In the “Topic check medicine” members of the public can submit proposals via an online form. If a scientific question for an HTA report can be inferred from a proposal, it is included in the public list of topics.

According to the legal remit, topics of particular importance for patient care are selected from the proposals submitted. For this purpose, once a year IQWiG conducts a 2-step selection procedure for topics: the Selection Committee, whose members contribute the consumer and patient perspective as well as the scientific perspective, preselects up to 15 topics. The Institute then selects 5 topics for which HTA reports are produced in collaboration with external researchers.

New legal remit

The Statutory Health Insurance (SHI) Act to Promote Competition introduced this new task for IQWiG in 2015: § 139b (5) of Social Code Book V now stipulates that persons insured in the SHI as well as other interested individuals can propose topics for HTA reports to IQWiG. IQWiG’s “Topic check medicine” replaces the previous public proposal procedure for HTA reports, which the German Institute of Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI) was responsible for until 2015.

In 2016 IQWiG will start the first selection of topics after a shortened proposal phase of 3 months. The work on the HTA reports is to start in mid-2017 and the publication of the first HTA reports is planned for 2018.