ICON and ICHOM unveil the world’s first global patient outcomes benchmarking platform

Dublin, Ireland, 27 October 2017 – 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 organisation 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.

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 organisations 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 organisations 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 organisations.  The Standard Set specific benchmarking visualisations will be unveiled at ICHOM’s annual conference on the 25th and 26th of October 2017 and 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 practice. However, collecting and evaluating important patient-reported data is of paramount importance in understanding the patient’s perspective of care. ICHOM’s GLOBE pilot program brings informed perspectives that cannot be overlooked in the journey toward improving value for the patient.”

Christina Rångemark Åkerman, President of ICHOM, commented: “The GLOBE benchmarking pilot is an exciting example of outcomes in action. For the first time, outcomes data from multiple hospitals around the globe are collected and compared. The insights will provide great opportunities to drive improvements in patient care via learning and sharing of best practices between hospitals.”

Dr. Steve Cutler, Chief Executive Officer, ICON plc, commented: “Today’s launch marks a major milestone towards the realisation of ICHOM’s and ICON’s shared vision of improving patient care.  The measurement and sharing of outcomes will ultimately improve the clinical development process by enabling better protocols that will lead to the development of treatments that will be of most benefit to patients. We are proud to have brought our clinical and technical expertise in health outcomes and real-world data to help ICHOM create the first global healthcare outcomes benchmarking platform.”

About ICHOM

The International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) was founded by Michael E. Porter, PhD, Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School, The Boston Consulting Group and  Professor Martin Ingvar, Karolinska Institutet  with the mission to unlock the potential of value-based health care by defining global Standard Sets of outcome measures that really matter to patients for the most relevant medical conditions and by driving adoption and reporting of these measures worldwide. In January 18 2017 ICHOM and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) signed a Letter of Intent to collaborate on the collection, analysis and publishing of patient reported outcomes for international comparison. To date ICHOM have published Standard Sets covering 47 percent of the global disease burden.

Further information is available at www.ichom.org

About ICON plc

ICON plc is a global provider of drug development solutions and services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries. The company specialises in the strategic development, management and analysis of programs that support clinical development - from compound selection to Phase I-IV clinical studies. With headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, ICON currently, operates from 97 locations in 38 countries and has approximately 13,380 employees.

ICON Media Contact

Deena Mistry
Weber Shandwick
+44 (0)207 067 0387
DMistry@webershandwick.com

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