Using Expert Elicitation to Adjust Published Intervention Effects to Reflect the Local Context

Abstract

Background. Local health services make limited use of economic evaluation to inform decisions to fund new health service interventions. One barrier is the relevance of published intervention effects to the local setting, given these effects can strongly reflect the original evaluation context. Expert elicitation methods provide a structured approach to explicitly and transparently adjust published effect estimates, which can then be used in local-level economic evaluations to increase their local relevance. Expert elicitation was used to adjust published effect estimates for 2 interventions targeting the prevention of inpatient hypoglycemia. Methods. Elicitation was undertaken with 6 clinical experts. They were systematically presented with information regarding potential differences in patient characteristics and quality of care between the published study and local contexts, and regarding the design and application of the published study. The experts then assessed the intervention effects and provided estimates of the most realistic, most pessimistic, and most optimistic intervention effect sizes in the local context. Results. The experts estimated both interventions would be less effective in the local setting compared with the published effect estimates. For one intervention, the experts expected the lower complexity of admitted patients in the local setting would reduce the intervention’s effectiveness. For the other intervention, the reduced effect was largely driven by differences in the scope of implementation (hospital-wide in the local setting compared with targeted implementation in the evaluation). Conclusions. The pragmatic elicitation methods reported in this article provide a feasible and acceptable approach to assess and adjust published intervention effects to better reflect expected effects in the local context. Further development and application of these methods is proposed to facilitate the use of local-level economic evaluation. Highlights Local health services make limited use of economic evaluation to inform their decisions on the funding of new health service interventions. One barrier to use is the relevance of published intervention evaluations to the local setting. Expert elicitation methods provide a structured way to consider differences between the evaluation and local settings and to explicitly and transparently adjust published effect estimates for use in local economic evaluations. The pragmatic elicitation methods reported in this article offer a feasible and acceptable approach to adjusting published intervention effects to better reflect the effects expected in the local context. This increases the relevance of economic evaluations for local decision makers.