International Medical Registries Database to Track Outcomes

A publicly accessible database of medical registries will help researchers to better track outcomes, and through that improve quality of treatment for some of the world’s most burdensome health conditions.

The International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM; Boston, MA, USA), was launched in September 2012 with more than 50 registries from 20-plus countries covering nearly two dozen health conditions. The international consortium was launched by Boston Consulting Group (BCG; MA, USA), the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Harvard Business School (HBS; MA, USA), and the Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden) in a joint effort to codify outcomes and measures, putting them in a format that allows providers to compare healthcare quality in different countries.

The four strategic priorities of the consortium include providing a global resource of in-use outcome measures and risk-adjustment factors by medical condition; the advancement of international standardization around the best outcome measures by condition; catalyzing the establishment and improvement of disease registries; and enabling a global, cross-stakeholder network dedicated to advancing outcomes measurement. ICHOM will focus primarily on diseases that carry the highest economic burden, and will later stratify broad conditions such as heart disease into more narrow categories; the finding will be publicized via standard channels and academic journals.
“What we're trying to do is enable best practices sharing by comparing outcomes for either diseases or procedures in a structured format,” said Peter Lawyer, senior partner and managing director of BCG. “Our goal is to try to create a community that comes together to talk about tracking and comparing outcomes.”

By tapping international partners, researchers can access more well-established registries outside their own borders. Also, since the practice of medicine varies from setting to setting, the data will allow providers to better learn from the different outcomes.

Related Links:
The International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement
Boston Consulting Group
Harvard Business School