HEALTH TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT (HTA) DECISION MAKING SYSTEM FOR HEALTHCARE IN NIGERIA USING ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS

Abstract

In the developed countries various Health Technology Assessment (HTA) has been used to make decision on the most appropriate health technology to be acquired. However, developing countries are yet to take advantage of HTA when deciding on what health technology to procure. This research carried out a study on the applicability of HTA within our local hospital which revealed the pressing need for HTA model and software system that can support hospitals in carrying out HTA seamlessly. Hence, a HTA model based on Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) was proposed and developed in this thesis. The result of this research will help hospital especially within Nigeria to easily carry out HTA when faced with the problem of choosing the best among health technology alternatives given multiple criteria. The system was developed using C# programming language, ASP.NET framework and Accord Library (Linear Algebra Library). The system was evaluated using the responses of questionnaire filled by a group of medical stakeholder at Ota General Hospital which comprised of (A Resident Doctor, A Radiologist, A Technologist and the Procurement Manager). Additionally, this research not only sensitize the hospitals and medical professionals on the benefits and importance of exploring health technology assessment when procuring any health technology but also, made the task easy by automating the entire process of using analytical hierarchical process to solving HTA by developing a software system(NHTA). NHTA abstracts the burden and minimizes human error of carryout HTA while being fast and accurate.