Independent, academic experts are key voices in the drug spending debate, but it can be challenging for policymakers and the media, much less the public, to hear directly from multiple experts on a single topic. Even when multiple experts are consulted, small differences of opinion between experts on specific aspects can obscure general expert agreement on the overall policy. CIDSA’s expert panel surveys use a standard set of questions to gauge expert opinion on various drug spending policy options, distilling collected expert wisdom into understandable and comparable scores.

CIDSA’s expert panel surveys use a simplified two-stage Delphi survey methodology. In the first stage, experts are presented with a description of the policy and asked to evaluate that policy on standardized metrics; the experts also suggest areas where more information is needed to evaluate the policy. In the second round, the experts once again evaluate the policy on the same metrics, but this time with an anonymous summary of how their peers evaluated the policy in the first round. The experts will also score the areas where more information is needed that were suggested in the first round, highlighting questions for policymakers to address. After the second round, CIDSA staff create a visual representation of the second-round scores and summarize the policy in a standard format for publication.