ICON and the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement unveil the world’s first global patient outcomes benchmarking platform

ICON plc, (NASDAQ: ICLR) a global provider of drug development solutions and services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries, and the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM), a non-profit organization with the mission of driving value based health care, shared the findings of a global patient outcomes benchmarking platform at this week’s ICHOM’s annual conference in Washington DC. The platform aims to catalyse physician driven learning and improvement of the outcomes that matter most to patients.

ICON and ICHOM first partnered to advance value-based healthcare through the launch of a global healthcare outcomes benchmarking pilot program called GLOBE in March 2016. 

The pioneering work of the GLOBE pilot program, through its collaboration with a global network of participating sites who provided de-identified data, has enabled the development of a global platform for collecting, storing, aggregating, analysing and visualising health outcomes data. In just under 18 months, ICON and ICHOM have processed in excess of 200 data transfers, collected data from 70 health care facilities and developed risk-adjustment algorithms based on over 75,000 procedures. This work was done in close collaboration with the provider organizations who have full ownership of the data and the clinical leaders and patients in the working groups who defined the datasets in the first place.

The platform will provide decision support tools and insights to participating health care organizations for optimising and improving patient outcomes, using ICHOM developed Standard Sets. ICHOM Standard Sets provide a common language and approach to measuring outcomes at the medical condition level – ICHOM currently has Standard Sets for 21 conditions that cover approximately 47% of the global disease burden.

Professor Ola Rolfson, Department of Orthopaedics, Institute of Clinical Sciences Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, expressed: “The GLOBE pilot program brings good news. It is possible to engage institutions globally in collecting ICHOM standard set data. The results have helped understand variation and factors determining outcomes. By continuous feedback and re-measuring, the program will keep striving to improve outcomes by benchmarking as a network.”

The platform has been developed using the widely accepted OMOP framework to effectively benchmark outcomes across diverse health care organizations.  The Standard Set specific benchmarking visualizations will be unveiled at ICHOM’s annual conference on the 25th and 26th of October 2017and will be available via a provider portal in Q1 2018.

Professor Mats Lundstrom, Department of Clinical Sciences, Ophthalmology, Faculty of Medicine, Lund University, Sweden stated: “The use of a patient reported outcomes measure in cataract surgery is not yet an established best