The project team and the Scientific Board met in-person on October 21, 2018, during the ACS Clinical Congress in Boston, MA. The purpose of the meeting was to review the recommendations included in the HTA and set priorities for next steps.
Establishing the Value of the Recommendations
Part one of the meeting included discussion of each recommendation with a focus on articulating the current level of evidence that if each recommendation were adopted it would contribute to the value of PGHD captured via mHealth for SSI surveillance. The discussion utilized the Henshall-Shuller14 framework for value establishment (see Table 6) presented by Dan Pollock at the PSAG Workshop (see Appendix C).
Attendees first voted on which level of value they thought should be articulated for each recommendation. This was followed by robust discussion and a second round of voting. A complete summary of the discussion and voting is included in the Meeting Summary document (Appendix D). The outcome of this process was the identification of the level of value establishment for each recommendation, which is present here in Table 7.
Priority Setting
Part two of the meeting was devoted to priority setting for the ten recommendations. Meeting attendees ranked the recommendations in order of which areas should be prioritized in ASSIST project activities in year 2. The three priority areas that emerged from this process were:
1. Recommendation 5: Establishing a Community of Practice
2. Recommendation 7: Developing a database patient-generated wound photos,
3. Recommendation 8: Leveraging PGHD to characterize the natural history of SSI and review current practice and surveillance standards.
The project team and Scientific Board agreed that ASSIST project activities in year two will work to advance all of the ten recommendations, with particular focus on the three above priority areas. For a full description of the priority setting activities see Appendix D.