Thursday, January 10, 2019

Using Welphi to build a Population Health Index – The Euro-Healthy case



Welphi was used to integrate the Euro-Healthy (Shaping EUROpean policies to promote HEALTH equitY) project, a three-year Horizon 2020 research project launched in January 2015 which aimed to advance knowledge of policies that have the highest potential to enhance health and health equity across European regions. 

The project envisioned the development of tools – based on a Population Health Index (PHI) – to evaluate and monitor overall health as well as interactions between health and multiple dimensions at different geographical levels. The PHI was then used to foresee and discuss the impact of multi-level policies and combinations of policies in population health (PH) and health equity across European regions, thus providing a basis for policy dialogue.

Euro-Healthy brought together 15 multidisciplinary institutions from 12 European countries assuring a multi-sectoral approach required to employ cross-cutting determinants of population health and it was developed through eight research work packages (WP).

Welphi integrated the work developed in WP6 – Decision support for multicriteria modeling of the population health index and evaluation, foresight and selection of policies – proving to be a major asset in the approach taken towards the research work, answering to the project’s specific needs of developing inclusive non-face-to-face participatory processes, to be carried out with both health experts and stakeholders. Welphi was mainly used for the activities of:

1| Indentification of indicators;
2| Construction of the Indicators’ Value Functions;
3| Weighting the Indicators.

To ensure that the Euro-Healthy PHI considered the multiple dimensions that PH entails and was informed by evidence, a specific socio-technical design was built combining concepts of multicriteria value measurement with participatory processes through the development of several modified Web-Delphi processes technically sound in MACBETH (MACBETH - Bana e Costa, C.A., De Corte, J.M., Vansnick, J.C. (2012), “MACBETH”, International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, 11, 2, 359-387), resorting to Welphi.

The Web-Delphi processes conducted through Welphi, making use of its friendly and attractive interface, proved to be in fact an inclusive and effective way of collecting information from a high number of geographically dispersed experts and stakeholders aiding the building of the PHI with their insights thus allowing for the collection of first-hand knowledge and experience regarding the development and application of methods and tools for the health evaluation context.

Welphi’s processes results were then used to inform and assist a smaller and strategic group of participants to solve the questions in hand, as an effective way of including the views of an enlarged number of participants in the decision making process.

As a result of all the work developed in the Euro-Healthy’s scope the Euro-healthy Web-GIS (https://healthyregionseurope.uc.pt) now provides a wide range of robust information to analyse PH and health inequities across European regions.

Adapted from http://www.euro-healthy.eu/, where you can find more about the Euro-Healthy project. Test Welphi for yourself at http://www.welphi.com/.

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