Comparison of methods to elicit stakeholder preferences for multi-criteria decision analysis in the context of disease prioritisation

Disease prioritisation is a decision analysis problem; somehow, the differing opinions of stakeholders need to be balanced to reach a decision acceptable to the group. Multi-criteria decision analysis methods offer quantitative, repeatable decision making solutions. By dividing the problem into measurable criteria on which stakeholders base their decision, subjective stakeholder preferences can be modelled as weights of importance for the criteria. Aggregation of weights with objective disease measurements for the criteria provides an overall disease score, weighted to reflect stakeholder preferences.