LISAvienna Business Seminar: Successfully bring medical devices onto the market - purchasing processes and reimbursements in the Austrian health care system

Walter Vozi, responsible for the medical technology at the Vienna Hospital Association for the KH Nord project, offered insights into the procurement processes in the hospital. In addition to the basic requirements such as CE certification and quality management, he introduced the processes on which the purchasing decisions are based. The process ranges from the project proposal by doctors, nurses, technology and other essential users to the collection and examination of tenders, the contract, installation, commissioning and training through to maintenance and collection. Vozi made it clear that product quality alone is not enough to make a purchase decision in the hospital.

In the second lecture, Agnes Kisser from the Ludwig Boltzman Institute for Health Technology Assessment spoke. Together with the Institute director Claudia Wild, she leads the Project Group "Evaluation of Medical Services" there. Her presentation focused on the benefit assessment of product devices for reimbursement decisions. In addition to the submission procedures, examples from the practice were also discussed. Here it was shown that only very few of the submitted accomplishments are indeed ultimately recommended for the reimbursement. One main reason for this is often the lacking studies, that provide no clear conclusion with regard to the medical evidence of the achievement.

Philipp Lindinger, Managing Director of the industry association AUSTROMED, spoke of reimbursement in the extramural area. By means of a process flow diagram, he demonstrated the arduous path that medical devices are subject to travel from submission and through several tests until they are finally accepted as part of the tariff list. Finally he explained how AUSTROMED is trying to make the reimbursement processes even more transparent and presented the idea of "saving on medical products not by, but through them!".

In addition to the technical input, the participants had the opportunity to exchange experiences in the fields of reimbursement in Austria over wine and bread.

Peter Halwachs and Martin Mayer of LISAvienna also offered an outline of the next events for Vienna Life Sciences companies. Among other things, the Shared Research Facilities and Pro Industry funding programs of the Vienna Business Agency were introduced and the LISAvienna events calendar for 2015 was presented. In addition, the coming survey for the LISA sector statistics and the Austrian Life Sciences directory was referred to and active participation was requested.