Health Technology Assessment as trigger to innovate Intellectual Capital in Healthcare Organisations

European Health Institutions and Agencies increasingly push healthcare organisations to use Health Technology Assessment (HTA) tools for the medical devices and drugs evaluation processes, producing a coercive pressure according to the regulative pillar of the Institutional Theory (IT). The use of HTA tools in healthcare organisations implies the creation of new knowledge that has to be combined with that stored in the human, relational, and structural dimensions of their Intellectual Capital (IC). Therefore, HTA can represent an actual trigger of innovation of the dimensions of the IC and some factors – belonging to normative and cultural-cognitive pillars of the IT – of the context in which the health organizations operate can determine the effectiveness of this innovation. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies in the literature analysing the relationship between HTA use and the innovation of three IC dimensions of healthcare organizations and the role played by IT in this relationship. While building on a case study, this work aims to represent a first explorative step to analyse how the innovation of the IC dimensions is triggered by the use of the HTA tools, considering also the moderating role of the factors that characterize the pillars of IT.