What Every Healthcare Professional Should Know About the Delphi Method

The role of a healthcare project manager calls for a timeless awareness of all aspects of the project and how future events could impact the progress of the said project. These events can benefit your project or challenge its progress according to how you encounter them. But how is it possible to forecast future events relevant to your healthcare niche with any degree of certainty? This is where the aptly named “Delphi Technique” can help. 

The Delphi Technique is a method of collecting the expert views of those with the greatest perspective on the matter at hand. After the assembled group of experts exchange their views, they will collect their assumptions and estimates of each other’s assumptions to a facilitator, who will calculate the tallies and issue a summary report on the matter. 

How It Works

This group of members, also called ‘panelists’, will then discuss the results of the forecast and reassess their estimates, providing updated results to the facilitator. This process will continue until each avenue of thought has been fully explored, and the panelists have reached a consensus.

The experts of this panel have a complete record of what forecasts have been made by the other panelists and the revised results of each round. Because all comments are made anonymously, it is easy to comment freely, and this allows for openness and the capacity to express opinions freely. This method is vital to accumulate proper knowledge in healthcare and improve the provided services.

This is an article on how to assemble and run a Delphi session for healthcare research and investigation purposes. As you work through this guide, you will be able to predict certain events and their impact on your project.

This technique is a large iterative process that benefits from the collected opinions of various medical experts with a unique perspective on the process. The results from the first round provide the important questions for the third round, and so on through the sequential rounds until hard results are formed.

The final goal is to clarify and expand on various issues through comparing and contrasting different perspectives until a consensus is reached. Information collected through this method will become extremely useful in devising new treatment methods or discarding old ones. Various doctors and other healthcare professionals will learn to adapt their practice based on your results and improve the standard of care throughout the community.

Step 1: Choose a Facilitator

The first step in the healthcare research process will be choosing an able-minded facilitator for the project. You can choose to take on this role yourself or select someone from your organization to handle this task for you. A meticulous record keeper with a knack for research and investigation would be an excellent candidate for the job. It would also help if your facilitator is passionate about medical research and loves to devise newer and better methods.

Step 2: Identify Your Experts

The most important component of your Delphi session is the panel of medical experts on the subject matter. This could be the other members of your project. An expert is anyone with relevant knowledge on the projects or important aspects of the project that can provide a fairly accurate assessment of the project in certain foreseen conditions. Your experts should have not only proper knowledge but also an appropriate level of experience working in the field.

Step 3: Define the Problem

Ask yourself what exactly is the project or issue that you would like to understand. The experts must have a clearly outlined situation they can visualize — the clearer the vision of the situation, the clearer the forecast. Having vague goals is not good in terms of research. You and your fellow researchers or participants should be clear on the problem before getting started.

Step 4: Round One Questions

The first round will consist of general questions to gain a better understanding of the situation and various events. It will help gain a better understanding of the existing medical framework and how to improve upon it in accordance with the standards set by a competent medical communications agency. These questions can be in the form of a survey or questionnaire. The facilitator will then collect the responses and remove irrelevant material and define the common viewpoints. 

Step 5: Round Two Questions

Based on the answers from the first round of questions, the questions collected in the subsequent rounds will delve deeper into the topic and provide clarification for specific issues. These questions can also be presented in the form of a survey or questionnaire. Once again, the responses will be collected, streamlined, and summarized in an effort to build a consensus.

Step 6: Round Three Questions

The final round of the questionnaire is to focus on supporting the creation of a decision. Condense the result into a specific area of agreement. You may wish to include three or four rounds or as many as needed until an ultimate consensus is reached.

Step 7: Act on Your Findings

After you have completed as many rounds as necessary, a consensus will be reached, and your view of specific events will be narrowed down to a narrow set of practical options. The next step is to analyze the findings you have and place plans and evasive maneuvers to minimize impact to your project.

Conclusion

The Delphi Technique is a great way to create healthy work structures and identify the risks in your healthcare framework. This can be used in place of a brainstorming session to devise better ideas and simply innovate.