PURPOSE: Evidence is needed to enable robust and defensible decision making across health care contexts. Different decision making processes rely to a different extent on clinical or subject experts to supplement their evidence requirements. In some contexts, such as public health and for communicable diseases, experimental evidence may be unfeasible to collect within reasonable timescales, necessitating the need for experts' beliefs in order to make allocation, reimbursement and prioritisation decisions.

This session will consider the complexities of different contexts for decision making in healthcare and discuss the considerations for using experts' beliefs within these contexts.

DESCRIPTION: Following on from a brief introduction to the topic, the session will consider two specific contexts in which experts’ beliefs may be considered relevant to help inform decision making: 1) complex interventions/settings, specifically the development of novel therapies with unproven modes of action, 2) evaluation conducted in LMIC settings, used to inform prioritization and planning. A third session will focus on behavioral considerations for the use of experts' beliefs in different contexts.

Moderator (Laura Bojke). Introduction and rationale to use experts’ beliefs in health, different contexts in which elicitation techniques have been applied.

Presentation 2 (15 mins): Dina Jankovic. Use of experts’ beliefs to generate prior evidence to inform the evaluation of complex and early stage interventions.

Presentation 3 (10 mins): Victoria Shaffer. Cognitive heuristics and their resulting biases in expert judgment, environmental constraints on judgment, learning from experience, and strategies for debiasing judgments.

Presentation 4 (15 mins): Abigail Colson. Use of experts’ beliefs in the global health setting, prioritisation and system strengthening.

The workshop will use real-time polling to work through considerations for different contexts in which expert beliefs can aid decision making. Audience discussion about the opportunities and challenges of using different methods in these contexts and the agenda for further research.