How multidisciplinary teams matter in public health expertise: A case study on the 2023 French infectious disease...

Infectious disease prioritization exercises have been part of national and international health surveillance. They typically use multi-criteria approaches and generally involve expert groups composed of physicians and public health specialists from various disciplines. However, little is known about the impact of multidisciplinarity composition itself.

This paper builds on the 2023 infectious disease prioritization exercise conducted by the French High Council of Public health (HCSP) which employed a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) method; a model-based re-analysis of the initial prioritization is provided.

Using multilevel modelling methods, we evaluated the impact of the contributions of non-infectious diseases physicians by testing two hypotheses: i) significant differences exist in risks ratings across specialties for several criteria; ii) these differences impact the final disease ranking.

Using pediatricians as a case study and comparing them to infectious disease specialists (IDS), we found that pediatricians' ratings differed significantly for six out of eight criteria. Counterfactual analyses demonstrated that excluding pediatricians' responses or simulating a panel composed entirely of pediatricians altered the final disease classification.

Our findings underscore that a multidisciplinary approach to disease risk assessment facilitates a broader -and likely more accurate- consideration of population needs.