An expert on every street corner? Methods for eliciting distributions in geographically dispersed opinion pools.

Recent publications outline developments in eliciting probabilistic opinions from clinical experts with which to inform structural assumptions and parameter estimates in health economic models. We outline approaches taken to date to elicit probabilistic distributions from experts within the health economic literature and outline the appropriate considerations and the resulting process in developing a new elicitation program with the aim of allowing low-cost elicitation of expert opinion from a heterogeneous and geographically dispersed opinion pool while preserving the essential features of good practice elicitation methods.