ECHO Project www.echo-health.eu … What is the ECHO Project

… What is the
ECHO Project?
Financed by the European Union 7th
Framework Programme and led by the Institute
for Health Sciences in Aragon (IACS) Spain, ECHO
Consortium is made up of a combination of
public institutions and high education
organisations with a strong background on public
health, health services and health economics
research, policy analysis and knowledge
brokering.
The European Collaboration for Health
Optimization (ECHO) is an international
project aimed at analysing and assessing
healthcare performance within and across
European countries.
ECHO Project
Scientific Coordinator:
Enrique Bernal Delgado, MD PhD
@EU_ECHOhealth
echohealth.iacs@aragon.es
www.echo-health.eu
www.echo-health.eu
www.echo-health.eu
The European Healthcare agenda is set up on three big
pillars: strengthening healthcare effectiveness, increasing
accessibility and improving resilience.
Underpinning those three elements, the assessment of
health systems’ performance and the routinely use of
existing health information systems.
ECHO is widely aligned with this agenda and provides
instruments to inform policy decisions on health-care
inequalities, effectiveness, quality, safety and efficiency.
Methods
Based upon routinely collected administrative data,
ECHO conducts a variety of observational studies
(ecological and cross-section with associated time-series)
to analyze either the population exposure to healthcare
or patients’ outcomes.
For that purpose, ECHO has built a homogeneous data
infrastructure with 200 million patient episodes, all of
them geo-localized into the place of residence and
hospital of treatment, has developed coding crosswalks
to allow comparisons across 6 coding languages, has
hospital of treatment, has developed coding crosswalks to
allow comparisons across six coding languages, has
mapped meaningful healthcare geographic areas enabling
sound cross-country analyses, and has estimated robust
benchmarks to allow learning and exchange.
report analyzing the original sources of information and
describing the ECHO data infrastructure, and the map of
codes that has been used to compose the set of ECHO
performance indicators.
In Europe, the place of residence determines the
population exposure to effective and safe care. In
Europe, the hospital where a patient is admitted
makes a difference in the odds of getting better or
worse care. European citizens are facing high
opportunity costs in those areas producing high rates
of low-value care.
Acces ECHO Web-Tool
via echo-health.eu
ECHO policy-oriented outputs
At this point in time, ECHO has produced several outputs
that might be of interest for policy making. Available at the
website are a series of Atlases showing unwarranted
variations in performance within and across countries, a
report analyzing the original sources of information and
describing the ECHO data infrastructure, and the map of
codes that has been used to compose the set of ECHO
performance indicators.
ECHO has also developed a Web-Tool that allows the
implementation of customized analyses, comparing incountry and cross-country providers, both at geographic
and hospital level.
www.echo-health.eu
ECHO has proven to be a powerful tool in the
assessment of Healthcare Systems Performance
across Europe, upgrading existing experiences and
tools.