Abstract
Healthcare decision making, including regulatory and reimbursement decisions, is based on uncertain assessments of clinical and economic value. This arises from the evidence supporting those assessments being uncertain, incomplete, or even absent. Qualitative, structured expert elicitation (SEE) is a valuable tool for extracting expert knowledge about an uncertain quantity and formulating that knowledge as a probability distribution. This creates a useful input to decision modeling and support, particularly in areas with limited evidence, such as advanced therapy products, precision medicine, rare diagnoses, and other areas with high uncertainty.
Structured SEE protocols are used to improve the transparency, accuracy, and consistency of quantitative judgments from experts, limiting the effect of heuristics and biases. This task force report introduces 5 commonly used protocols for SEE (Sheffield elicitation framework; modified Delphi method; Cooke’s classical method; investigate, discuss, estimate, aggregate protocol; and the Medical Research Council reference protocol). It describes the common elements of SEE, discusses how these protocols differ in their implementation of those elements and illustrates the use of the protocols.
Authors
Marta Soares Abigail Colson Laura Bojke Salah Ghabri Osvaldo Ulises Garay Jenna K. Felli Karen Lee Elizabeth Molsen-David Oswaldo Morales-Napoles Victoria A. Shaffer Maarten J. IJzerman