How to make a right decision in health care: Multi criteria decision analysis in the healthcare system

The decision-making process of introducing new technologies into the health care system must minimize individual interests of policy makers and reduce possible biases and faults while building up the best health portfolio available. The main obstacles for achieving these goals may relate to the large number of technologies assessed each year while the budget available annually is limited. Therefore, the priority-setting process should rely on proven and quantitative methods to increase its acceptability among the different stakeholders. A variety of methods were traditionally used for the evaluation and assessment of medical technologies. However, many of them have significant drawbacks. We suggest that the Delphi method can be used as a convenient tool for reaching a rapid agreement on utilization of resources of the healthcare system under budgetary constraints.