European value-based healthcare benchmarking: moving from theory to practice

Area of Science:

• Health Services Research
• Oncology
• Health Economics

Background:

• Value-based healthcare (VBHC) aims to enhance healthcare value through improved health, care-process, and economic outcomes.
• Benchmarking is crucial for identifying best practices and improving quality across healthcare organizations.
• International benchmarking can facilitate the sharing of data-driven best practices among diverse healthcare systems.

Purpose of the Study:

• To provide a proof-of-concept for the feasibility of international value-based healthcare (VBHC) benchmarking in breast cancer.
• To establish a data-driven approach for sharing best practices among international healthcare organizations.
• To identify variations in health, care-process, and economic indicators within breast cancer care.

Main Methods:

• Data collection on patient-reported, clinical, care-process, and economic outcomes within the VOICE community (a European healthcare cluster).
• Identification of patient archetypes using clustering techniques.
• Development of a 50-indicator set via a modified Delphi approach for benchmarking, utilizing regression models controlling for patient archetypes and socio-demographic factors.

Main Results:

• Inclusion of 690 patients from six healthcare centers.
• A defined set of 50 health, care-process, and economic indicators was established for benchmarking.
• Statistically significant differences were observed across sites in most health outcomes, half of the care-process indicators, and all economic indicators, enabling performance comparison.

Conclusions:

• This study represents the first international experience in VBHC benchmarking for breast cancer.
• Observed indicator differences across healthcare centers offer opportunities to identify best practices and enhance healthcare quality.
• The applied methodologies hold potential for advancing VBHC benchmarking in other medical conditions.