The organisational domain in HTA reports: towards a technology-oriented assessment

Introduction:
Organisational aspects in Health Technology Assessment
(HTA) reports play a significant role in managing policies
and strategies to implement new health technologies. The
organisational domain, however, is often under-represented in
HTA reports. This study explored how organisational assessment is carried out in building HTA reports and designed a
new perspective through an empirical approach after the
comparison with EUnetHTA’s Core Model 3.0.
Methods:
Full HTA reports were extracted from the websites of members
of International Network of Agencies for HTA and the aspects
relating to the organisational assessment were analysed. HTA
reports were classified into 4 typologies of assessed technologies (device, diagnosis/screening, intervention and organisational procedures) and organisational aspects described in
them were explored through a framework of 5 domains and 15
subdomains from CoreModel. Specific Multiple
Correspondence Analyses (MCAs) were carried out in order
identify specific, technology-related domains for organisational assessment in HTA reports.
Results:
The analysis showed that domains and subdomains of
CoreModel were not covered homogeneously by the organisational assessments in the HTA reports. Through specific
MCAs, 4 new technology-related dimensions were identified
and named according to the CoreModel’s subdomains that
belonged to the 4 new clusters (Governance of innovation,
Demand Analysis, Patients/Stakeholders involvement, Patientcentered care).
Conclusions:
This study analyzed the significance of organisational
assessments in current literature and the challenges of
improving this domain in HTA reports. Through an empirical
analysis on retrieved HTA reports, we proposed a new
methodology to cover the most relevant aspects of organisational appraisal according to new, technology-related domains
to promote support to the assessment of organisational issues
in reports and fulfill the needs of future HTA research across
Europe.