The primary objective of health technology assessment (HTA) research is to provide fundamental information for decision-making regarding the healthcare system on the national or regional level. Therefore, it is important to understand to what extent and in what manner (e.g. decision-making, behavior changes, and information recognition) the information provided by the HTA has influenced decision-makers. 

Following its establishment, the National Evidence-based Healthcare Collaborating Agency (NECA) has generally classified the performance of its HTA research into the following categories: academic performance, policy performance, internationalization performance, social performance, and infrastructure performance. Internal reports have been the main venue for quantitative evaluations of performance in these categories. However, the HTA research of NECA has been criticized for its minimal impact on policy and for concerns related to the reliability of the internal audit results, including failure to establish an objective evaluation process that involves external evaluators and information recipients, and—especially for policy performance—failure to reflect the views of policy-makers beyond those included in the process by the head of the department. Thus, the necessity of a more systematic evaluation and management system has long been recognized.

Accordingly, in order to establish a system for assessing the influence of HTA research, we developed a set of influence assessment criteria through reviews of both domestic and international case analyses and preceding studies, and as a test case, applied these criteria to HTA research previously conducted by NECA to analyze its performance and to assess its influence.