Structured Expert Elicitation for Healthcare Decision Making Emerging Good Practices Task Force Preliminary Findings

Evidence is needed to enable robust and defensible decision making, but it can often be insufficient or unsuitable. Different decision-making processes across the health sector rely to a different extent on clinical or subject experts to support allocation, reimbursement and funding decisions.

There are a number of ways in which experts’ beliefs can be elicited but there is little or no guidance on the applicability and appropriateness of alternative methods for particular health care decision making contexts. Examples of relevant contexts are reimbursement decisions on complex interventions/complex settings or novel therapies with unproven modes of action, requests for off-formulary use of medicines (US) or individual funding requests (UK), or evaluations conducted in low- or middle-income settings used to inform prioritization and planning.

We will use polling to engage with the range of stakeholders in the audience to identify barriers and facilitators to the use of elicitation methodology in support of decision making across a range of decision-making contexts.

The session will include:

• General introduction and content of the task force (Bojke,5 min)
• Rationale for the use of expert elicitation, description of different ways in which it has been used to support healthcare decision making (IJzerman,10 min).
• Methods available to elicit experts’ judgements (Colson,10 min)
• Structured discussion (40min, Soares will present the task force’s considerations on each topic and Bojke will chair the polling and audience discussion)
  • Topic 1: (10 min) Alternative decision-making contexts/settings over which elicitation may be applied in, and requirements for elicitation.
  • Topic 2: (10 min) Applicability of existing protocols/guidance: barriers to implementation.
  • Topic 3: (10 min) Potential facilitators for elicitation.
  • Open discussion (10 min)