EUHA_WHITE_HEALTHCARE

Our work

LEARNING
IN VALUE

One of the priority areas for the alliance is the transition towards more person-centred care, implementation of person pathways and measuring outcomes that matter to patients.

Value for patients

The EUHA members are ever working to make care more person-centred and increase the value of care. As part of EUHA, the leaders of their programmes and researchers come together in a dedicated multi-disciplinary working group. All members of the working group play a leading role in their organisations and in the Learning in ValuE (LIVE) working group they share experiences, successes and challenges and will develop evidence-based recommendations for implementation. Learning from each other will stimulate and accelerate the transition across Europe.
As part of the EUHA Strategic Plan, the working group aims to ‘increase the quality and sustainability of healthcare by establishing, sharing and implementing best practices, supported by benchmarking of patient centred outcomes’.

Care Pathways

Moving towards high value care entails important changes in institutional organisation, workflow and requires different ways of working from staff. Care is organised in condition-oriented pathways and clinicians work in team-based approach and around the patient instead of following traditional medical disciplines. Traditionally, for example a woman suffering from breast cancer would meet professionals from the radiology clinic, oncology clinic, surgery clinic, radiotherapy clinic and the plastic surgery clinic. While they do work together the organisational structures make it difficult to provide truly integrated and person-centred care. Now, patients and their families play an active role in defining the pathways and expected outcomes.

Patient Empowerment

Moreover, to support shared decision-making clinical outcomes and outcomes reported by the patient himself need to be discussed by the clinician and patient together. This requires new competences in terms of knowledge, soft skills and attitude from staff. To support this, the project aims to share best practices and outline the necessary conditions for implementation and training in this area. Additionally, some LIVE colleagues, and its coordinator Prof Tanja Stamm, are involved in the IMI-II project Health Outcomes Observatory (H2O). The H2O project brings together the public and private sectors to create an unprecedented, standardised data governance and infrastructure system across Europe to incorporate patients’ experiences and preferences in decisions affecting their individual health care and those of the entire patient community. With H2O infrastructure and tools, patients will be able to measure their outcomes in a standardised way, whilst keeping full control of their data. Ultimately, this framework of Observatories aims to foster innovation in health care in Europe and beyond to deliver better outcomes for all. You can learn more about the H2O project here.

Benchmarking

Additionally, to let value lead and improve care it is necessary to capture patient reported and clinical outcome, process measures, and resource use. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the European Union and it is the third most common cause of death by cancer in women. Therefore, the LIVE working group has made breast cancer the topic of its first benchmarking project. LIVE will compare the clinical pathway of breast cancer patients in nine critical points. This will help clinicians to learn from each other, determine and share best practices. Additionally, this will be the first time that we exchange data electronically. And this is why this is a collaborative project with the Digital Health Data Network. We will exchange data electronically and in doing so we will hopefully clear the way for more extensive projects, not only about breast cancer but also about other diseases. The LIVE working group is also involved in the Healthcare Transformation Academy project, about which you can read more here.

Coordination

Tanja Stamm

Vienna, Austria

Universitätsklinikum AKH Wien -
Med Uni Wien

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