Global research aims for the study of cost and value in health professions education: A Delphi study of international experts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Health professions educators constantly make difficult choices about the allocation of finite resources. However, there is limited sound research available to guide their decision-making. The purpose of this study was to address this gap by establishing international consensus on research aims, considering diverse economic and cultural contexts. METHODS: The authors conducted a three-round Delphi study, engaging an international panel of 73 experts in education research. Panelists were asked to identify (round 1), rank (round 2), and revise (round 3) research aims important for the study of cost and value in medical education. Round 3 results were discussed by an international steering group of nine medical education scientists actively involved in cost and value research, who finalized a list of 20 research aims. Steering group narratives were analyzed to identify additional conceptual insights. RESULTS: From 597 research aims suggested in round 1, 20 research aims were identified after steering group discussion. These were clustered into three categories: (1) funding mechanisms for medical education (e.g. financial policies, cost-effectiveness, and equity impacts); (2) cost and outcomes, e.g. how costs in health professions education relate to concrete outcomes; and (3) economic evaluation of teaching, assessment, and training approaches; e.g. designing and applying formal economic evaluation methods. Steering group discussions noted the limited integration of economic theories into medical education research and the need for foundational studies beyond immediate, practical priorities. They further noted lack of consensus on definitions of cost and value, and appropriate methodologies; underutilization of accepted health economics approaches; and infrequent interdisciplinary collaborations. These collectively act as barriers to advancing the field. CONCLUSION: The field of cost and value in health professions education remains theoretically and empirically underdeveloped. The research aims identified herein provide a strategic framework for addressing cost and value comprehensively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".