Expert consensus-building for developing guidelines: lessons learned from a dengue economics workshop / Unificación de las opiniones de los expertos para la formulación de directrices: enseñanzas extraídas de un taller sobre los aspectos económicos del dengue

A workshop with 20 experts of diverse backgrounds from five countries in the Americas was convened for two-and-a-half days in March 2012 to discuss and develop a standardized methodology for assessing the economic cost of dengue. This article discusses a number of factors that contributed to the workshop's success, including: engaging the experts at various stages of the process; convening a multidisciplinary group to reduce expert bias and provide a more comprehensive and integrated approach; facilitating guided small- and large-group discussions; developing effective cross-cultural collectivism, trust, communication, and empathy across the expert panel; establishing clear lines of responsibilities within each group of experts; breaking down the complex issues into smaller and simpler ideas; providing ample background materials in multiple languages prior to the workshop. Challenges and areas for improvement are also covered.

Se convocó un taller con 20 expertos provenientes de diversos ámbitos de cinco países de las Américas con el propósito de analizar y elaborar un método normalizado de evaluación del costo económico del dengue; la duración del taller fue de dos días y medio en marzo del 2012. En el presente artículo se analizan diversos factores que contribuyeron al éxito del taller, entre ellos la vinculación de los expertos en diversas.

Overcoming data limitations: design of a multicomponent study for estimating the economic burden of dengue in India.

Dengue is emerging as a serious global health problem. Estimating the economic burden of dengue is crucial to inform policy-makers of the disease’s societal impact and may assist in implementing appropriate control strategies. However, developing such studies is constrained by limited data and other challenges. This paper shows how analyzing hospital records carefully can adjust surveillance data for possible under-reporting and misdiagnosis of dengue, merging information on treatment patterns with macro costing to estimate the cost of dengue episode by age and severity in various treatment settings, and combining adjusted surveillance data with cost information can estimate the aggregate cost of dengue illness in India and in other endemic countries.