Leading European Hospitals are embarking on a patient-centric way of providing health care in their clinical practice
Members of the European University Hospital Alliance (EUHA) are rolling out H2O outcome sets to collect patient-reported outcomes in a standardized way
The IMI-funded initiative Health Outcomes Observatory (H2O), focused on collecting Real World Evidence (RWE) and putting the patients in the center, has been a priority project for EUHA over the last years. Together, we have defined standards for collecting patientreported outcomes and testing them in the clinical day-to-day. What has been a vision for long, is now becoming reality as the project is entering the implementation phase.
Among the first to implement H2O outcome sets are the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Medical University of Vienna. Already two clinics within Charité – in the area of IBD and diabetes – are using the so-called H2O pragmatic sets, aiming at keeping the effort
around the collection process itself as low as possible, for patients and clinicians.
“We know that the standardized collection of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) will only work on the long run if both patients and doctors don’t see it as a burden but as added value. This is how the pragmatic outcome sets are designed and this is how we believe it can work sustainably in the clinical day-to-day.”, says Prof. Dr. Matthias Rose, Head of the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at Charité.
Also, the Medical University Vienna has started to use the H2O outcome sets in their diabetes clinic for collecting PROs. A major milestone not only for patients and clinicians, but also for researchers all over the world.
“From a research perspective, with better access to large, standardized data sets that bring patient-reported and clinical outcomes together we can create a stronger evidence base for healthcare decision-making at all levels.”, says Univ.-Prof. Dr. Tanja Stamm, H2O scientific coordinator, Head of the Institute for Outcomes Research, Deputy Director of the Center for Medical Data Science at MedUni Vienna and Head of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Arthritis and Rehabilitation.
What two of the leading hospitals in Europe started only marks the beginning of the implementation phase of the H2O project. With Vall d’Hebron Barcelona University Hospital in Spain, Erasmus MC in the Netherlands, University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium, Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden, King’s College Hospital in the United Kingdom and San Raffaele Hospital in Italy, more EUHA members are in the starting block to follow and make real-world evidence-based decision making and patient empowerment in healthcare a reality.