Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to understand the most important factors to design and evaluate a telehealth system for Parkinson's disease

BACKGROUND: The assessment of a new health technology is a multidisciplinary and multidimensional process, which requires a complex analysis and the convergence of different stakeholders into a common decision. This task is even more delicate when the assessment is carried out in early stage of deve...

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Autores principales: Cancela, Jorge, Fico, Giuseppe, Arredondo Waldmeyer, Maria T
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4705498/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26391847
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6947-15-S3-S7
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author Cancela, Jorge
Fico, Giuseppe
Arredondo Waldmeyer, Maria T
author_facet Cancela, Jorge
Fico, Giuseppe
Arredondo Waldmeyer, Maria T
author_sort Cancela, Jorge
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The assessment of a new health technology is a multidisciplinary and multidimensional process, which requires a complex analysis and the convergence of different stakeholders into a common decision. This task is even more delicate when the assessment is carried out in early stage of development processes, when the maturity of the technology prevents conducting a large scale trials to evaluate the cost effectiveness through classic health economics methods. This lack of information may limit the future development and deployment in the clinical practice. This work aims to 1) identify the most relevant user needs of a new medical technology for managing and monitoring Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients and to 2) use these user needs for a preliminary assessment of a specific system called PERFORM, as a case study. METHODS: Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to design a hierarchy of 17 needs, grouped into 5 categories. A total of 16 experts, 6 of them with a clinical background and the remaining 10 with a technical background, were asked to rank these needs and categories. RESULTS: On/Off fluctuations detection, Increase wearability acceptance, and Increase self-management support have been identified as the most relevant user needs. No significant differences were found between the clinician and technical groups. These results have been used to evaluate the PERFORM system and to identify future areas of improvement. CONCLUSIONS: First of all, the AHP contributed to the elaboration of a unified hierarchy, integrating the needs of a variety of stakeholders, promoting the discussion and the agreement into a common framework of evaluation. Moreover, the AHP effectively supported the user need elicitation as well as the assignment of different weights and priorities to each need and, consequently, it helped to define a framework for the assessment of telehealth systems for PD management and monitoring. This framework can be used to support the decision-making process for the adoption of new technologies in PD.
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spelling pubmed-47054982016-01-20 Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to understand the most important factors to design and evaluate a telehealth system for Parkinson's disease Cancela, Jorge Fico, Giuseppe Arredondo Waldmeyer, Maria T BMC Med Inform Decis Mak Research Article BACKGROUND: The assessment of a new health technology is a multidisciplinary and multidimensional process, which requires a complex analysis and the convergence of different stakeholders into a common decision. This task is even more delicate when the assessment is carried out in early stage of development processes, when the maturity of the technology prevents conducting a large scale trials to evaluate the cost effectiveness through classic health economics methods. This lack of information may limit the future development and deployment in the clinical practice. This work aims to 1) identify the most relevant user needs of a new medical technology for managing and monitoring Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients and to 2) use these user needs for a preliminary assessment of a specific system called PERFORM, as a case study. METHODS: Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to design a hierarchy of 17 needs, grouped into 5 categories. A total of 16 experts, 6 of them with a clinical background and the remaining 10 with a technical background, were asked to rank these needs and categories. RESULTS: On/Off fluctuations detection, Increase wearability acceptance, and Increase self-management support have been identified as the most relevant user needs. No significant differences were found between the clinician and technical groups. These results have been used to evaluate the PERFORM system and to identify future areas of improvement. CONCLUSIONS: First of all, the AHP contributed to the elaboration of a unified hierarchy, integrating the needs of a variety of stakeholders, promoting the discussion and the agreement into a common framework of evaluation. Moreover, the AHP effectively supported the user need elicitation as well as the assignment of different weights and priorities to each need and, consequently, it helped to define a framework for the assessment of telehealth systems for PD management and monitoring. This framework can be used to support the decision-making process for the adoption of new technologies in PD. BioMed Central 2015-09-04 /pmc/articles/PMC4705498/ /pubmed/26391847 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6947-15-S3-S7 Text en Copyright © 2015 Cancela et al.; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Cancela, Jorge
Fico, Giuseppe
Arredondo Waldmeyer, Maria T
Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to understand the most important factors to design and evaluate a telehealth system for Parkinson's disease
title Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to understand the most important factors to design and evaluate a telehealth system for Parkinson's disease
title_full Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to understand the most important factors to design and evaluate a telehealth system for Parkinson's disease
title_fullStr Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to understand the most important factors to design and evaluate a telehealth system for Parkinson's disease
title_full_unstemmed Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to understand the most important factors to design and evaluate a telehealth system for Parkinson's disease
title_short Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to understand the most important factors to design and evaluate a telehealth system for Parkinson's disease
title_sort using the analytic hierarchy process (ahp) to understand the most important factors to design and evaluate a telehealth system for parkinson's disease
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4705498/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26391847
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6947-15-S3-S7
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