A structured approach to knowledge elicitation in conceptual model building

Policy-oriented modeling demands client involvement in the model-building process. This poses a knowledge elicitation problem, i.e., how to obtain the necessary knowledge from a group of people. Traditionally, interviews and freely interacting groups have been employed most frequently for this purpose. In this article, the authors present an approach to knowledge elicitation that employs a combination of different techniques to arrive at a conceptual model of a regional health care system. The adopted approach is sufficiently general to be employed in other model development processes as well.