CONTEXT There is a strong interest in the Veterans Administration (VA) Health-care System in promoting patient engagement to improve patient care. METHODS We solicited expert opinion using an online expert panel system with a modified Delphi structure called ExpertLens™ . Experts reviewed, rated and discussed eight scenarios, representing four patient engagement roles in designing and improvi...

An important question when eliciting opinions from experts is how to aggregate the reported opinions. In this paper, we propose a pooling method to aggregate expert opinions. Intuitively, it works as if the experts were continuously updating their opinions in order to accommodate the expertise of others. Each updated opinion takes the form of a linear opinion pool, where the weight that an expe...

On the basis of a low probability insurance experiment with substantial money on the line, we demonstrate that concern is an important driver of willingness to pay (WTP) for insurance when there is ambiguity surrounding the estimate. Concern still plays an important role when probabilities are given precisely. This finding explains why some individuals pay too much and others little for insuran...

The paper deals with the research in the area of knowledge acquisition from multiple experts when knowledge includes temporal component. The expert’s ranking refinement technique is presented which is based on of the most supported opinion among all the experts. Paper answers to the following questions: how to derive the most supported knowledge from the multiple experts about the unknown tempo...

In 1754, Spanish officials and Catholic missionaries in the province of Sinaloa, located in northwestern Mexico, debated the wisdom of requiring local Indians to pay tribute to the King of Spain while exempting certain non-Indian settlers from such payments. A Jesuit missionary, whose opinion but not his name is preserved in the historical record, argued against the measure, indicating that the...

Background: Attention impairments are the hallmark feature of subclinical depression. The present study used Navon task to compare the allocation of attention to the local and global stimuli in depressed and nondepressed participants. Method: The primary sample included 186 female high school students from Shiraz city who were selected using cluster sampl...