Healthcare payers and providers don’t have to look far to get unbiased, independent judgment about the evidence on name-brand medical devices, thanks to The Evidence Bar™—a new resource from ECRI Institute.

“With our new Evidence Bar and restructured summary format, health professionals can now more quickly and confidently inform their decisions on new and emerging interventions,” says Vivian H. Coates, MBA, ECRI Institute’s vice president of health technology assessment.

The Evidence Bar is ECRI Institute’s proprietary approach to weighing the benefits and harms of a specific, name-brand device (or drug). The bar shows one of five possible indicators, each aligning with a specific judgment about the evidence on a technology: unfavorable, raises concerns, inconclusive, favors, or greatly favors the technology.

“Available evidence rarely addresses every key question and is almost never firmly conclusive. Whereas others may assign a low rating to inconclusive evidence—implying that one should disregard the technology—The Evidence Bar signals payers and providers to proceed with caution and stay tuned for more developments,” says Diane C. Robertson, director, health technology assessment, ECRI Institute.

Value analysis specialists from large national health systems and medical policy directors from payers validated the tool and new-and-improved executive summary. They confirmed that the new approach provides a quick, clear picture of safety, efficacy, and future evidence development for committee meetings. Early feedback indicated that the executive summary is easily read and understood in less than three minutes.

Further, ECRI’s membership-based health technology assessment service provides trusted, objective science-based analyses of clinical evidence and informed judgment on new and emerging drugs, devices, diagnostics, implants, procedures, and interventions to help payers and providers track healthcare innovations, improve patient outcomes, and make sound value analysis or coverage decisions.