HOW CAN THE DELPHI METHOD BE AN ALLY IN THIS POST COVID-19 WORLD?

 

We are still living a global all hands on deck period. The world is trying to find a way to work together and, at the same time, flatten the Covid-19 curve, keeping ourselves healthy and safe. Meanwhile, the global market is working on providing the best and most timely research, analysis, and news coverage on COVID-19, to ensure accurate information – what seems to be more difficult than usual – and, that way, improve the world’s public health technologies and bring solutions for this period of crisis.

We had to recreate the way we do business and how we manage information exchange, even with the barriers of social distance. Companies around the world are working on public health solutions against the virus, while technological ideas to support the market began to appear more often in order to reduce human interactions, maintaining worker's productivity, and generating automation. 

Considering this new reality, collecting information from clients, suppliers, and the community has become even more challenging, hereby the process of engaging people has to take place in a non-face-to-face format.

The Delphi Method was developed to facilitate formal discussion among selected experts and stakeholders around a particular topic, where they have the opportunity to exchange their knowledge/ opinion anonymously about a complex topic. With a focus on a systematic collection and aggregation of informed judgment, the method encourages the participants to share and change their opinions – if needed - over some rounds. The aim is to obtain a reliable group opinion and build consensus. 

This method has been used for years and now it is even more needed. Delphi, in a web-based format, is the best solution for those in search of building consensus and we can prove it, because of its attractive and uncomplicated form:

• Ensures anonymity avoiding social pressure 
• Engages participants in a non-face-to-face format 
• Combines individual judgments to lead to a “process gain”, considering that groups may perform better than their best member alone 
• Allows each participant to respond at its own pace and time even when they are geographically dispersed or without time 
• Delivers controlled feedback and statistical summary of answers 

Indeed, the virus is still out there. Let’s do our best to keep ourselves safe and, at the same time, generate interaction and knowledge, adding value to our business and helping the world to get closer to the end of this crisis. We believe Delphi can be the best solution.
Would you like to give it a try? You are welcome! Our user-friendly and responsive web-based platform implements the Delphi Method and helps you to build consensus among participants, geographically disperse or with a busy agenda, in a non-face-to-face format, and with real feedback.

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Welphi’s new release is now live!

We had already found the best way to implement the Delphi method across an online platform and now we have been working hard to improve our product and continue to deliver the best experience for our customers by adding more questioning options, charts, and more. 

These exciting new features are now available and we are happy to share them with you by opening a 14 days free trial if you want to experience how to build consensus in an easy and quick way.

If you have already tried Welphi and want to do it again to check the new version, you are welcome! Just send us an e-mail at support@welphi.com 

So, what's new?  

- Quantitative Questions: Delphi processes typically include questions where participants’ answers come as a number. You can create this type of question, by defining the units for the response and the range within which the answer has to fall into. Participants are able to provide their answers by typing into a box or using a numerical scale by dragging an interactive slider. 

- Ranking Questions: A Ranking question is a simple type of question where participants are asked to order a set of options according to their preferences in light of the context presented. These options can be treatments, projects, scenarios, you name it! Doing this in Welphi is as simple as dragging and dropping! 

- Chart Control: We all know that looking into data as a chart makes it a lot easier to understand and analyze. For both Quantitative and Raking questions you can now add an automatic chart built with the previous round’s information.

- Forum Control: We already know that one of the main advantages of the Delphi process over a traditional online questionnaire is the ability to let people evolve on their opinions based upon other participants' answers and comments. Now we took it to another level, by introducing a real-time chat control where the participant can exchange their points of view live. Even if a participant left the questionnaire already, he will be warned by e-mail whenever another participant quotes one of his comments. 

Here you will find detailed descriptions and instructions of the new features. 

Ready to start working with the new version? Collecting opinions from experts geographically disperse at their own pace and time has been easier than ever!
Feel free to contact us if you have questions, suggestions, or remarks. 

We will love to hear from you. Hope you enjoy it!  Decision Eyes // Welphi Team

Consensus decision-making for governments in times of health crisis

Health policies design is related to a political context and must follow legal precepts, involving local stakeholders on its design and implementation process. Developing a proper and coherent political action plan for health public decisions in times of COVID-19 requires organization and information to deal with the current and future consequences of this new pandemic. 

Nowadays, the support for public decision-making in contexts of great complexity and uncertainty has been the focus of theoretical and applied research. For this reason, it is important to have methods that can support such decisions by accounting for multiple points of view and public policies objectives. 

In this context, answering strategic questions, for instance, “what to do?” and “for what?”, as well as operational questions, like “when to do it?” and “how to do it?”, may benefit of cooperative processes of acquisition and construction of collective knowledge.  

How can Welphi help in this task? 

We offer a new tool designed to assist users in creating web Delphi surveys, the Welphi platform, in which participants geographically disperse can engage in debates at their own pace and time preferences, in order to generate consensus about topics set up by the facilitator. 

The Welphi platform can be used to develop different Delphi processes that aim at:

(1) identifying stakeholder and experts’ objectives and the first list of health policies that can be used to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.  

(2) collecting opinions on the attractiveness of each health policy to achieve the objectives, in several rounds of collective knowledge generation. Same, for the doability of each policy. 

(3) combining knowledge and evidence in the previous processes to support the evaluation of health policies through the construction of a multicriteria model.

Scenarios for Population Health (PH) inequalities in 2030: The Euro-Healthy Project Experience

Health inequalities have been consistently reported across and within European countries, placing major challenges to policy-making. There are several challenges in the design and implementation of policies for reducing health inequalities, not only on how to assist policy-makers to holistically evaluate policies’ benefits but particularly on how to anticipate the extent to which future events may affect those policies. 

Scenarios development, regarding what could affect the population health inequalities, is considered critical to help policy-makers and the scientific community to prepare and better cope with fast-evolving challenges. Within this context, the Euro-Healthy Research Project (2015-2017) proposed a multicriteria Population Health Index, which took the construction of population health scenarios as a key challenge to inform the evaluation of policies in the context of health inequalities evolution.

Method

In this study, the Welphi platform was used to set up a 2-round Web-Delphi process for driver’s identification with a panel of 51 experts and other stakeholders: 

Round 1: open-ended questions for idea-generation regarding the reasons for possible evolutions in population health in Europe. 

Source: Alvarenga et al (2019)

Round 2: participants to state their agreement regarding the potential drivers obtained in round 1. The answers were given on a five-level Likert scale (‘Strongly Disagree’, ‘Disagree’, ‘Neither Agree nor Disagree’, ‘Agree’, ‘Strongly Agree’). With the support of the Welphi platform, approval and rejection rules were applied to lead to a final set of 49 drivers. 

The results of the web-Delphi were then used in two face-to-face workshops with a strategic group of 13 experts where three scenario narratives were elaborated regarding the evolution of PH inequalities in Europe until 2030: ‘Failing Europe’ (worst-case but plausible picture of the future), ‘Sustainable Prosperity’ (best-case but a plausible picture of the future) and Stuck’ (best of our knowledge’ evolution). 

Source: Alvarenga et al. (2019)
Conclusion

By using the Welphi platform, this scenario-building process allowed to include the views and perspectives of a diverse and geographically dispersed group of experts, stakeholders and policy-makers. This not only contributes for their validity but particularly meets the challenge of enhancing participation in scenario building. 

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