​Who We Are

The Impact Assessment Unit (IAU) is a health services research unit established in 2021. Our unit evaluates healthcare innovations to provide information on the potential value of these innovations. We are part of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medicine Innovation institute (AMII) and comprise of a hybrid team of administrators and researchers from SingHealth and the Duke-NUS Medical School. 

What We Do

Overview

The IAU strengthens decision-making on funding, support, and adoption and scaling of healthcare innovations in our Academic Medical Centre (AMC) and beyond, through the following:

• Provide guidance and expertise in health services research, with focus on the evaluation of the impact of healthcare innovations.
• Perform assessments of innovation projects for grant panels to strengthen decision-making.
• Conduct health technology assessments such as cost-effectiveness analyses to generate evidence on the value of health innovations.
  

Impact Assessment Framework

IAU's impact assessment framework consists of two parts:

• Function 1 – Triaging of healthcare innovation proposals
• Function 2 – Evaluation of healthcare innovations
  

Function 1 – Triaging of healthcare innovation proposals

Aims to identify high potential innovation projects for further support

IAU has developed a decision support tool, aligned with our institutional priorities, to systematically identify healthcare innovation proposals that are more likely to lead to impactful implementation and sustainable adoption. This tool is currently used to perform assessments on the potential impact of healthcare innovation proposals. Based on our assessments, we provide inputs to grant panels and project teams.

Please refer to the publication below for details on our decision support tool.

Cai, Y., Nazeha, N., Perera, S., Thiéry, A. H., Girard, M., Lee, C. E., Hong, W., & Graves, N. (2023). A decision-support tool for funding health innovations at a tertiary academic medical center. International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, 39(1). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266462323000028

Function 2 – Evaluation of healthcare innovations

Generating and disseminating evidence about potential value of innovations

We identify projects suitable for impact assessment and collaborate with project teams to generate evidence of the expected costs and outcomes (e.g., changes to health-related quality of life) from the adoption and scaling of a healthcare innovation. This helps to inform the project teams and the AMC on the probability that adopting an innovation will be a "good" decision.

We carry out four sequential tasks for Function 2:

1. Identify the elements of the innovation via the "PICO" mnemonic.
2. Design a method for the quantitative assessment of costs and outcomes.
3. Conduct data synthesis to update the model with best available information.
4. Perform model evaluation and publish findings in peer reviewed literature.
   

Please refer to the publications below for examples of our Function  2 work.

• Cai, Y., Philips, E. C., Arora, S., Sim, J. X. Y., Chow, W., Nazeha, N., Whiteley, S., Auw, M. Y. X., Tiang, D. C., Neo, S. L., Hong, W., Venkatachalam, I., & Graves, N. (2024). Cost-effectiveness of a real-time spatiotemporal mapping surveillance system for meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus prevention. The Journal of Hospital Infection, 143, 178–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhin.2023.09.010.
• Cai, Y., Chang, K., Nazeha, N., Gosavi, T. D., Shen, J. Y., Hong, W., Tan, Y., & Graves, N. (2023). The cost-effectiveness of a real-time seizure detection application for people with epilepsy. Epilepsy & Behavior, 148, 109441. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yebeh.2023.109441
  

Contact Us

Please contact Ms Elaine Tai ([email protected]) for enquiries.