Health Technology Assessment

Abstract - The adoption of Stroke Units in stroke care assistance has been proven to be the best currently available technology in terms of outcomes, including stroke patients' reduced death and disability incidence rates. The purpose of this study is to review the relevant literature, concerning both the impacts of innovative technology on healthcare and the most used model for the evaluation of health technology (HTA), in order to elaborate a new framework for the innovative technology performance assessment and evaluation. The framework aims at measuring several dimensions of impact of the Stroke Unit technology and is intended to be applied across a diverse range of healthcare providers to favor best practices diffusion. It has been tested by applying it to two pre-selected Hospitals adopters of Stroke Units. Semi-structured interviews and document analysis provided being major sources of data whose elaboration was based on normalization and graphical representation. Findings confirmed Stroke Units positive impacts in terms of overall performance improvements. Moreover, the outcome is enhanced if Stroke Units are part of a wider Stroke Care Program.