Global vale-based care

As the topic of value-based care gains momentum globally, HCF continues to play a leading role in shaping the agenda and informing the direction of this critical transformation in Australia. Central to this work is HCF’s collaboration with the Boston-based and Harvard-affiliated International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM), which entered its second year in April 2017. Together, HCF and ICHOM are working to define international standards for quality measurement and to evaluate the feasibility and impact of these standards in clinical practice.

HCF’s focus

While ICHOM and its partners have developed standardised outcome sets across 21 medical conditions thus far, with another nine to be completed by the end of 2017, HCF has focused its collaboration on a more limited set of conditions where there is a high burden and/or evidence of potential for improvement.

These conditions include Hip and Knee Osteoarthritis, Pregnancy and Childbirth, Oral Health and Overall Adult Health. We believe that systematic and patient-centred measurement of quality across these conditions is the first step towards better outcomes for thousands of Australians every year.

With funding support from the HCF Research Foundation, these ‘Standard Sets’ are now being evaluated for feasibility and impact in Victoria (Hip and Knee Osteoarthritis) and NSW (Pregnancy and Childbirth). The research projects not only hope to build evidence to support investment in wider measurement, but also to generate important knowledge around the art and science of implementing outcome measurement across a variety of clinical settings. These evaluations will take into account both patients’ and carers’ perceptions, as well as clinical effectiveness.

Initial insights and results

Early insights and results from this work were recently presented during the inaugural ICHOM Australasian Forum, which was organised by ICHOM in conjunction with HCF, Ramsay Health Care and the New South Wales Agency for Clinical Innovation. The day-long event, which drew a capacity crowd of more than 350 people to the Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney, featured overarching plenaries from international experts, as well as breakout sessions focusing on topics critical to advancing value-based care in Australia.

The HCF-supported project focusing on Hip and Knee Osteoarthritis was featured in a breakout session on implementation. In the session, Associate Professor Ilana Ackerman from Monash University and Bernarda Cavka, a physiotherapist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, described how they have gone about collecting patient-reported outcome data (in areas such as mobility, pain and quality of life) in a high-volume public hospital, including challenges and key lessons learnt.

For more information on ICHOM, visit ichom.org