News

EUHA gets a step closer to breast cancer benchmarking across Europe

DATE October 14th, 2022

Colleagues from the Learning In Value (LIVE) Working Group and the Digital Health and Data Network (DHDN) met in Vienna to work out important details of their joint project to benchmark breast cancer care.

The LIVE working group and the DHDN are working together on the benchmarking of breast cancer indicators. The project consists of selecting and collecting breast cancer indicators and obtaining measurable results about care pathways and treatments in EUHA hospitals. With this, colleagues aim to position EUHA as a pilot network for cancer outcome studies, improve care cycles in EUHA hospitals and launch a user-friendly benchmarking tool to be further used by other working groups. The project’s strategic value lies in combining the collection of indicators and the data management efforts needed to effectively benchmark between EUHA members,

Considering the progress and strategic importance of the project, a two-day joint LIVE and DHDN meeting took place on the 10th and 11th of October at the Medical University of Vienna, where EUHA colleagues discussed the project’s progress and next steps.  In addition to that, both groups also attended separate sessions to present a general update on their respective initiatives and main tasks.

LIVE WG

LIVE WG colleagues met and shared updates on their respective ongoing initiatives on outcomes-based care and patient pathways. For instance,  the group’s coordinator Prof Tanja Stamm (AKH Wien) shared that in the Health Outcomes Observatory project (H20) three Observatories have been established in Austria, Spain and the Netherlands. Dr Lindsay Ip (KHPs) presented the Healthcare Transformation Academy initiative and the available online courses that are open for enrollment currently. You can find more information here. As part of best practice sharing about the implementation of care pathways, UZ Leuven’s Head of Business Intelligence, Guy van den Boer, presented Leuven’s costing model based on the evaluation of patient journeys and care pathways. By sharing these practices and initiatives with each other, EUHA members are more empowered to support new models of more sustainable patient-centred healthcare.

DHDN meeting on breast cancer indicators

A separate meeting took place and brought together DHDN colleagues and data managers from several EUHA members. Experts discussed one by one all the breast cancer indicators and accomplished a major step in defining the exact data fields needed to implement the benchmarking. In addition, they discussed how to transform breast cancer data indicators within their home institutions’ databases and warehouses into a common data model OMOP,  which allows for performing systematic analyses with standardised analytic routines. The group expects to finalise the data field definition by mid-November and to reach a final benchmarking in the summer.