The long process by which HTA became a paradigm: A longitudinal conceptual structure analysis.

This study maps the conceptual structure of health technology assessment (HTA) research with the aim of contributing to a better understanding of this research stream. A bibliometric analysis of 1,198 HTA articles retrieved from the Web of Science database was conducted. The analysis of descriptive performance indicators identified the main traits of the scientific debate about the HTA in terms of publications, productive countries, and sources. A co-word analysis was performed by adopting social network analysis tools to map the conceptual structure of the dataset. The results highlight the growing academic interest in the research topic, especially in recent years. The results revealed that HTA is a widely known term and represents the reference paradigm for assessment in healthcare technologies. This paper contributes to the field by providing an examination of the current state of the art of HTA research and identifying possible future research directions. This study differs from existing studies because it involved a conceptual analysis of the scientific literature using macro keywords.

Financial configurations of Italian private hospitals: an evolutionary analysis.

Private hospitals are an important pillar in many hybrid systems. In Italy they are bound to grow, but we have little knowledge of how they are coping with financial pressures. We use a configurational approach to determine the relationship between the macroprofiles of Italian private hospitals and their performance. We built a unique dataset with governance and financial statements data of all Italian private hospitals. We use a combination of partial triadic analysis (PTA) and clustering technique to identify both the main explicative financial dimensions and hospital configurations, and trace their evolutionary paths from the beginning of Regional Health Care Turnaround Plans (2008) to 2016. Understanding the evolution of configurations, our study entails also some implications for policy and practice.