Alberta Innovates- Health Solutions

SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION AND TERMS OF REFERENCE OF THE STUDY
Health services internationally are emphasizing the need to ensure that medicine and health care delivery are evidence-based. For those involved with health related research, this development focuses attention on the importance of a strong research foundation and it enhances the potential contribution that relevant research can make. Equally, it places an onus on the research community to provide evidence of the value of its own activities, and it is one of the factors leading to a growing interest in methods for assessing, either retrospectively or prospectively, the value of research undertaken or proposed.

A small team of researchers, at the Health Economics Research Group (HERG) at Brunel University, have been considering how best the 'payback' or benefits of funded research projects might be conceptualized, described and measured. This work, initially for the UK Department of Health, proposed a conceptual categorisation of the benefits arising from health services research and introduced a model of 'payback'. These are referred to as the Buxton/Hanney payback categories and the Buxton/Hanney payback model, and they are summarized in Figures 1 and 2. They have been applied, by the HERG Team, in a number of ex post case studies of applied health services research projects in the UK.

There has been a considerable interest in the wider applicability of this work both to HSR undertaken in other countries, and to basic science or clinical research that may not yet be immediately applicable to health policy or practice. Professor Martin Buxton was invited by the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research to test and develop the Buxton/Hanney model in the context of its own programs of research. The objective was not to assess the overall payback from AHFMR-funded research, nor to 'audit' individual projects. Rather, the work focused on testing the approach to see if it might prove useful to the AHFMR in reviewing the payback achieved, or achievable, from the research it funds. This involved both confirming that the approach was transferable from the UK context, and the additional challenge of establishing whether the approach, or an adaptation of it, could be applied to other areas of health research such as basic biomedical and clinical science.