Orlaith Brennan, IPHA Director of Commercial Affairs, recently attended the ICHOM annual conference on value based healthcare in Rotterdam.
ICHOM is the International Consortium for Healthcare Outcomes Management and was co-founded by Professor Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School. Their mission is:
To unlock the potential of value-based healthcare by defining global Standard Sets
of outcome measures that matter most to patients and driving adoption
and reporting of these measures worldwide to create better value for all stakeholders
The objective of attending the conference was to see how other countries are dealing with data and to see if there are any best practices which could be applied in Ireland. It was no accident that the event was hosted in the Netherlands as their system is well progressed in both data collection, analysis, service improvement leading to both improved and better value for money outcomes.
Most of the discussion was about secondary care interventions but there were a couple of pharmaceutical case studies (prostate cancer and osteoporosis). The industry was represented by EFPIA DG Natalie Moll who spoke about the desire of the industry to develop outcomes measurement with payers and providers to optimize the value and access to innovative medicines. Ireland was represented by Professor Geraldine Doyle, Dean of the Smurfit Business School UCD who spoke about Time-Driven Activity Based Costing (TDABC) in the context of All.Can which is an international multi-stakeholder initiative working to improve the efficiency of cancer care by focusing on what matters to patients.
According to Orlaith Brennan: “Overall the conference was very beneficial in demonstrating the power of data in improving healthcare delivery, quality, value and outcomes for patients. The power of data was demonstrated many times but for me one of the outstanding case studies was presented by Phillips who demonstrated that technology and data capture has facilitated 1 in 8 US adult patients in ICU in the US to be remotely monitored, generating a 38% in acute capacity management, 26% reduction in mortality and 30% reduction in length of stay.
I’m looking forward to the day when Ireland too has the capacity to achieve these results for patients and the healthcare system”, she concluded.
