Economic evaluation of technological developments in the Prosthetics and Orthotics Laboratory

Abstract

Previous economic evaluations for health care have focused mainly on the clinical and pharmacological areas. This paper presents the implementation of a methodology for economic evaluation on technological research. The case of a new prosthetics design for partial foot amputee patients was used for analysis. The aim of this work was to calculate the cost of device manufacture and to separate it from research costs. A cost-minimization analysis was done based on the economic assessment by process. A business process mod- eling was adapted to synthesize research results to obtain a sequence of activities required for the production area (prosthesis manufacture process) and to generate a manufacture manual. Once the activities were modeled, the cost of prosthetics manufacture process and total time of prosthesis manufacture process were calculated. These results permitted identification of critical paths to ensure quality production that could be used for cost or process optimization.