2. Materials and methods
The study involved face-to-face, structured interviews with convenience samples of hospital managers in nine European countries.
2.1. The interview guide
An interview guide was developed including seven background questions dealing with the hospital and the respondent (e.g. size and type of hospital and the gender, age and education of the respondent), three introductory questions regarding decision making at the hospital in general, five questions about the information needed for decision-making and six questions about the decisionmaking process. See the interview guide in the online Appendix. The current article presents the answers to the questions about hospital managers’ informational needs.
The interview guide also included information about the nine domains of the HTA Core Model as well as the domain covering strategic and political aspects identified
in the literature [18,19]. In an attempt to avoid biasing the respondents in favor of HTA, the questionnaire did not include questions about the respondents’ perception of the value of the content of HTA. Instead, an open question was asked at the beginning of the interview (see Question 4 in Box 1).
The interviewer noted all the information mentioned by the respondents in answer to the first question (see Question 4 in Box 1) using the respondents own wording