Making the case for Delphi: a robust approach to consensus

By Professor Tanja Stamm, Co-Lead for H2O and Head of Section for Outcomes Research Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics, and Intelligent Systems Medical University of Vienna

The Health Outcomes Observatory (H2O), an IMI funded initiative launched in October 2020, is the first ever unified attempt to collect and incorporate patient-reported outcomes into health care decision-making at individual and population levels across multiple locations in Europe.

Why we selected the Delphi Exercise

We are the first PPP consortium, indeed, the first group anywhere to attempt to make it possible for everyone to share a common language around PROs at this scale.

Because this has never been done in this way, or at this scale before, we are undertaking a comprehensive consensus exercise using a Delphi process. This is a recognised methodology for reaching consensus within diverse groups, and will help us identify practical and patient-friendly solutions to enable patients to record and report outcomes and side effects with minimum effort.

We are the first PPP consortium, indeed, the first group anywhere to attempt to make it possible for everyone to share a common language around PROs at this scale.

The Delphi exercise begins by asking participants to openly nominate and rate the importance of various outcome variables for selected disease groups. This input is collected, aggregated, and redistributed across all Delphi participants, who can compare their original individual answers to that of the whole group. The Delphi participants are then asked to identify and rate important outcomes again but within this newly informed context. This process is repeated, promoting the evolving investigation into and refinement of the core outcomes to be selected.

What do we hope to achieve?

Our objective is simple. We want to give patients the tools to measure their outcomes (e.g. how they feel, how they experience symptoms etc.) in a standardised way. However, different measurements exist, and we thus need to agree on a set of standardized outcomes.

By using these standardized outcomes sets, clinicians and patients will speak the same ‘language’. We believe this will strengthen the voice of patients, keeping them at the heart of Value Based Health Care in Europe and beyond.

We believe this will strengthen the voice of patients, keeping them at the heart of Value Based Health Care in Europe and beyond.

We also believe H2O will go on to;

• improve access to the data informing and enhancing clinical decisions
• provide real world evidence showing the status and dynamics of patient populations
• improve quality and sustainability of care through better and more transparent evidence of patient measures and outcomes
• support the design and direction of new treatment development.

We encourage you to join us!

If you are a patient, clinician, academic or health authority member with up-to-date experience within Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Diabetes, Lung or Breast cancer and are interested in participating in the Delphi process, please email us at info@imi-h2o.eu.

We will follow up with joining instructions and answer any questions you may have.