142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

309688
Technical Standards for Policy Surveillance: Delphi Process and Technical Guide

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Monday, November 17, 2014

Sarah Happy, JD , Public Health Law Research, Philadelphia, PA
Scott Burris, JD , Temple University Beasley School of Law, Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice, Philadelphia, PA
Damika Barr, JD , Public Health Law Research, Philadelphia, PA
David Presley, JD , Public Health Law Research, Philadelphia, PA
We convened a committee of experts to build consensus on technical standards for policy surveillance. This committee assisted in proposing standards through a Delphi process. Topics covered included quality control, resources, content expertise, and the publication of legal datasets. The Delphi process unfolded over two rounds of independent assessment followed by a discussion of consensus results.  

The technical standards identified by the committee were used to develop a technical guide for policy surveillance, which details the process of collecting and measuring the law and making the resultant data available for public use. The guide articulates a process for systematic research and collection of the law including redundant research, consultation with experts and creation of detailed research protocols. Development of a coding scheme and coding of legal texts is addressed in several chapters that stress the iterative nature of coding and the need to apply stringent quality control measures including redundant coding, calculation of reliability measures and daily review of coding and the coding scheme. Finally, the technical guide outlines a process for publication of the data, and a detailed process for updating and ongoing measurement, ensuring it remains relevant and useful in analysis and evaluation.  This presentation reviews the Delphi process and its results, and explains key features of the process as set out in the technical guide.

Learning Areas:

Public health or related laws, regulations, standards, or guidelines
Public health or related public policy

Learning Objectives:
Explain the results of the Delphi process. Describe the methods used to conduct policy surveillance.

Keyword(s): Law, Public Policy

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am a lawyer working at Public Health Law Research and manage the policy surveillance program. I have spent several years managing the development of legal datasets as well as the development of the methods used to create them. I assisted in the drafting of the technical guide described in the abstract.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.