3.5. Expert involvement

Experts and stakeholders should be involved when determining the research questions and important outcomes. At KCE this usually consists of inviting a number of experts in the field to an expert meeting. While interactions between experts often are useful, there is a real danger that unprepared meetings lead to ‘suboptimal’ decisions. The following may make this process easier:

• Try to make them focus on the really important questions, there are usually lots of interesting questions but scope needs to be limited
• Explain on forehand the implications of the term ‘critical outcome’. It is useful to ask the question on beforehand: is the outcome that critical that one is prepared to downgrade the level of evidence if insufficient evidence is found for this particular outcome.
• Make a proposal on beforehand, expert meetings are often too short to construct a complete framework of questions with the relevant outcomes from scratch by the invited experts.
• It may be useful to ask experts on beforehand to provide ratings for the different outcomes (e.g. in an Excel sheet) and ask them to put their justification in writing.
• Try to give an introduction on GRADE so that everybody has an understanding of what it is and what the implications are.