European Collaboration for Healthcare Optimization Project meeting

With Europe’s health systems under increasing pressure, questions of access, quality and efficiency of services are asked more frequently. However, comparisons between countries or even between country’s regions are not immediate and accessible for public health researchers, healthcare managers or policymakers.

With Europe’s health systems under increasing pressure, questions of access, quality and efficiency of services are asked more frequently. However, comparisons between countries or even between country’s regions are not immediate and accessible for public health researchers, healthcare managers or policymakers.

Funded by the EU’s FP7 programme project ECHO – European Collaboration for Healthcare Optimization Project – will help to change this situation by developing a large hospital database with information from several European countries, and making these data available via an online summary tool. This way policy makers and health managers gain the possibility to compare their organisation or region with others, providing valuable information on efficiency and quality of care. Indicators that will be compared to show performance include measures of quality of care at provider level and geographical unwarranted variations.

“To adequately interpret the underlying “causes” of unwarranted variation in medical practice we need to account for each of the relevant contexts from provider to country”, said ECHO project leader, Enrique Bernal-Delgado. This month the project consortium met in Brussels to discuss the progress of the project.

At this stage partners are working on the development of the data warehouse, and more specifically setting a minimum common denominator of performance indicators comparable across systems. Related to this is the drafting of a handbook which will contain agreed best-practices on the methods that will be used in the design and analysis of data in each participating country. To assure the project is linked to the reality of the shop floor the project will be advised by national expert panels, a local dissemination group and a Scientific Advisory Board, which includes representatives of International Institutions such us the European Commission DG SANCO, OECD, WHO-Europe, etc.

Keywords

• Health services research

Countries

Austria, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Slovenia, United Kingdom