Abstract
Health research priority-setting exercises aim to maximize the impact of investments in health research. An increasing number of priority-setting exercises for health research have taken place in the past two decades. These exercises have been conducted for various areas of health research and at various levels (global, regional, national, local and institutional). In this chapter, we discuss the similarities and differences between health research priority setting and health intervention priority setting, and we describe the current methodologies used in health research priority setting and the role of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) therein. We provide three concrete suggestions for future methodological development in the field of health research priority setting: (1) recognize that many of the methodologies used to set health research priorities apply MCDA, (2) make use of well-established approaches or best practices for health research priority setting and (3) study in more detail the differences between health intervention and health research priority setting.
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Notes
- 1.
Research is defined here as in the Frascati Manual by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): ‘Creative work undertaken on a systematic base in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge about man, culture and society, and the use of this knowledge to devise new applications’ (Frascati manual: proposed standard practice for surveys on research and experimental development 2002). Health research is defined as in the Revised field of science and technology (FOS) classification in the Frascati Manual and includes the fields of basic medicine, clinical medicine, health sciences, medical biotechnology and other medical sciences (Working Party of National Experts on Science and Technology Indicators 2007).
- 2.
The population matrix describes the performance of the options against each criterion (Baltussen and Niessen 2006).
- 3.
Another is the Priority Setting Partnerships approach, which is mentioned under the third set of approaches, because it does not make use of multiple criteria.
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Viergever, R.F., Gouglas, D., Tromp, N. (2017). The Role of MCDA in Health Research Priority Setting. In: Marsh, K., Goetghebeur, M., Thokala, P., Baltussen, R. (eds) Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis to Support Healthcare Decisions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47540-0_12
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