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.