Why HTA + SRoI+ together validate MedTech innovations
A MedTech innovator and a care organisation’s buying committee ask different questions about the same product. The innovator asks: does it work, is it safe, what does it cost per outcome gained? The buying committee asks: what does this actually solve for us, for our staff, and for our waiting list – and who pays for it? Most business cases answer only one side, which is why promising innovations stall between the pilot and the purchase order.
HTA alone proves the technology, not the adoption case. A Health Technology Assessment (HTA) establishes clinical effectiveness, safety and cost-effectiveness against a comparator – the evidence spine regulators, insurers and clinical boards expect. But an HTA report rarely says what an innovation does to a specific organisation’s staffing gap, bed occupancy or waiting list. A technology can be clinically proven and still fail to get budget, because nobody translated “proven effective” into “this frees up 0.6 FTE on your night shift.”
SRoI alone proves value, but not rigorously enough to act on. Classic Social Return on Investment (SRoI) captures the broader stakeholder value – patient wellbeing, staff relief, avoided cost – that an HTA leaves out. Without a clinical evidence base underneath it, though, an SRoI story can read as marketing rather than a decision-grade business case. Boards that have seen inflated SRoI ratios before are right to be sceptical of a value claim with no effectiveness data behind it.
“Nobody translated “proven effective” into “this frees up 0.6 FTE on your night shift.”
Together, they close the gap
Care IQ’s SRoI+ approach uses HTA as its evidence spine and SRoI as its value language, and adds the piece both leave out on their own: capacity. The “+” is the operational and capacity impact – staff hours freed, waiting lists shortened, beds turned over faster – sitting alongside the clinical and financial case, using the same underlying evidence rather than a second, disconnected story.
That combination works for three reasons:
What data an HTA + SRoI+ case needs
Four categories, gathered once and reused across both the HTA and the SRoI+ view:
| Category | What it covers | Typical source |
|---|---|---|
| Clinical & effectiveness | Baseline vs. observed outcome, comparator, QALYs gained, cost per outcome (ICER), evidence level | EPD/ECD exports, clinical trials or registries |
| Capacity & operations | Waiting list length, wait times, staff FTE gap, bed/room occupancy, throughput, unmet demand – before and after implementation | Planning and rostering systems |
| Financial | Implementation and maintenance cost, avoided cost, budget impact by year | Finance/ERP systems |
| Stakeholder value | Who bears the input and who receives the outcome, financial proxy for non-market outcomes, and the deadweight/attribution/displacement/drop-off corrections applied to each | Workshops, interviews, national benchmarks (e.g. NZa, Vektis, CBS in the Netherlands) |
The pattern that makes this work in practice is a Digital Twin: capturing capacity and clinical data on the same organisation, timeframe and comparator, so a single before/after view can carry both the HTA outcome and the SRoI+ value – rather than reconciling two spreadsheets built on different assumptions after the fact.
Closing
If your innovation already has clinical evidence but no adoption story – or a compelling value story with no evidence spine – that is exactly the gap an HTA + SRoI+ case closes. Contact us for details!
See also: SRoI+ Approach (parent page) · MedTech Challenges (early-stage validation, “fail fast, to scale fast”) · Digital Twins
