Using e-Delphi to Evaluate the Pennsylvania Cancer Atlas

The Pennsylvania Cancer Atlas (PA-CA) is an interactive online atlas intended to help policy-makers, program managers, and epidemiologists with their tasks related to cancer prevention and control. The PA-CA is designed to support exploratory analysis and decisionmaking with spatio-temporal cancer data. To assess the usability of the initial versions of the PACA, we have solicited user feedback through multiple distributed focus groups and surveys. The process of acquiring user feedback leveraged our e-Delphi tool, which is an online web application designed to support structured input from and sharing of ideas among users distributed in space and time. In this paper we report our e-Delphi method and the results of our investigation with three sets of users. Participants suggested improving interaction functions, enhancing methods of temporal analysis, addressing data issues, and providing additional data displays and help functions. We have found that our extended e-Delphi method has several advantages, including its ease of use, ability to gather information from users distributed in time and space, and the relative anonymity of the participants (allowing people to be open about their comments). Some disadvantages include the need for regular prompting by the moderator, occasional non-participation, and brevity of comments.