Better health at lower cost

Evidence-Based Support for Coverage Policy and Prioritisation

Case studies: Health England - Preventative Health Care; Water fluoridation

Bazian have a variety of products that are specifically aimed at supporting policy making and prioritising health services. These may include anything from preventative and public health services, screening programmes, diagnostics, community care, drugs, devices, surgery, biotechnology and palliative services.

As with all Bazian products they are based on critical appraisal of high quality evidence. The results are presented not as dry lists and evidence tables, but rather with the level of interpretation required by the client. We are proud of – and guard our independence. We have strict conflicts of interest policies and will not take on work where we cannot be transparent about our methods and any potential conflicts. We have strict quality assurance processes in place and use academically approved methods of evidence synthesis.

As a consequence of our responsiveness, speed, independence and quality, we have been repeatedly called on to provide evidence assessments for controversial, high profile policy decisions (including issues that have been subject to judicial challenge).

Our policy support services are used:

To prioritise or rank services or interventions in terms of their individual and population level effects on clinical outcome and their costs, to help decide coverage and usage policy
To provide the evidence to inform individual funding requests, pre-approval requests or exception requests
To examine the potential opportunity costs of coverage decisions for a health economy
To review and re-organise policy and service provision to make it more clinically effective and cost-effective, based on evidence
To facilitate ensuing discussions between policy makers and stakeholder groups, and to integrate their differing perspectives with the evidence base
To ensure that policy decisions are compliant with the best, most up to date evidence
As “due diligence” checks before launching policy (including public health policies)
As independent, impartial evidence reviews to address areas of concern or contention between stakeholder groups, including
As independent assessments to contribute to judicial reviews of policy or coverage decisions
To develop indicators and metrics to ensure that policies are being complied with and to assess the clinical, process and cost performance of those policies

Our policy support services help ensure that the best evidence is used to support blue riband processes for policy making, ensuring that the resulting policies achieve their objectives, and are robust to scrutiny.