Information for eDelphi panellists
The eDelphi panel
Thank you for considering to participate the expert eDelphi panel that aims to validate quality indicators for register-based comparison and benchmark of pharmacotherapy across and within the Nordic countries.
- Delphi is an iterative consensus process that uses a series of structured questionnaires, administered and submitted in “rounds”.
- This study involves maximum four rounds of internet surveys (eDelphi) within a six month period.
- You will be contacted again at each round unless you cancel your consent for participation in this study.
At each round, you will be asked to rate a set of indicators based on your professional expertise. You will also be encouraged to provide free-text feedback and comments on the indicators and the indicator set. Rating is expected to take approximately one to two hours per round. You may save your answers at any time and return to the survey later.
The eDelphi panel members are envisaged to encompass multiple stakeholders from all Nordic countries, including healthcare professionals (primarily physicians, pharmacists), methodological experts (e.g., researchers, analysts) and potential users of the indicators (representatives of bodies responsible for national and regional healthcare quality assessment and steering).
The eDelphi panellists remain anonymous to each other, and all material and results will be published in a manner that individual respondents cannot be identified.
Criteria for selecting quality indicators for ranking
The quality indicators assessed in the survey are pre-selected through a process initiated by systematic literature search (scoping review), followed with an initial ranking and operationalisation by the MultiMed study team.
Read more about the scoping review: Prescribing quality indicators – Scoping review and eDelphi study
To be selected, the indicators needed to be calculable by explicit rules using structured data in the registries available in the Nordic countries (patient registries of secondary care contacts with ICD-coded diagnoses, prescription registries of dispensed pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical sales registries, population registries, causes of death registries).
Indicators are intended for population-level quality evaluation or benchmark, for comparison across Nordic countries or their subnational regions.
The indicator set is envisaged to be concise, yet comprehensive enough to capture different aspects related to effective and safe outpatient pharmacotherapy:
- Different stages of individuals life cycle (from children to older adults)
- Primary/secondary prevention, acute care, chronic care
- Relevant public health priorities commonly treated with medications in outpatient settings
- Effectiveness and safety dimensions
The eDelphi protocol was pre-registered with the Open Science Framework on 11.6.2024. Link to pre-registration: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2QMF7
The eDelphi study team
The eDelphi study team includes collaborating researchers from Uppsala University (Sweden), University of Southern Denmark, University of Copenhagen (Denmark), the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, the Finnish Medicines Agency, and the Social Insurance Institution of Finland.
Research project MultiMed
This eDelphi study is part of a larger mixed-methods research project “Multilevel governance and decentralization of medicine budgets – Striving for quality and sustainability (MultiMed)”. MultiMed is funded by the Research Council of Finland (Grant Nr. 354657). The principal investigator (PI) is Katri Aaltonen at the University of Turku (INVEST Research Centre), Finland.
More information about project MultiMed: Frontpage
Research ethics and processing of personal data
This eDelphi study has been given assent by the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Ethics Committee for Human Sciences at the University of Turku (Case Number TY/553/06.01.01/2024). Ethics Committee Statement
You can download the participant information sheet and the privacy notice regarding the processing of personal data below.
Person responsible for the research and contact person for further information
Katri Aaltonen (Principal investigator)
Academy Research Fellow, PhD (Pharm), Docent
University of Turku, INVEST Research Centre
Email: katri.m.aaltonen@utu.fi
Phone: +358-50-475 5862