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2/12/2014 - Press release

EURHOBOP, one of the 8 projects selected by the EU to be presented to healthcare experts, politicians and international journalists

IMIM coordinates this project, participated in by 11 European Countries

With the goal of promoting the safety of patients and the quality of healthcare in Europe, the European Commission, sponsored by the Italian Presidency, has organised a meeting in Rome on 2nd and 3rd December with the participation of healthcare experts, researchers, politicians and international journalists, to discuss, from different perspectives, how to promote the quality of medical healthcare through healthcare systems and how to improve security in hospitals. IMIM’s project is the only one selected from Spain.

The meeting will focus on communicating the results of some projects funded through the EU Healthcare Programme and the impact on the daily lives of Europeans. From all projects submitted, only 8 have been selected in several areas, one of them being the EURHOBOP Project (EURopean Hospital Benchmarking by Outcomes in acute coronary syndrome Processes), coordinated by Dr. Jaume Marrugat, a researcher from the research group on cardiovascular epidemiology and genetics at IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute).

The EURHOBOP project seeks to provide the European Union with a validated set of standardised monitoring systems to allow European hospitals to benchmark themselves, confidentially, to other European hospitals that share the same characteristics regarding the patients they treat and their facilities, based on a set of indicators that determine the quality of the medical healthcare provided to patients.

“EURHOBOP seeks to define a set of objective indicators to measure the quality of the medical healthcare provided to the population, specifically regarding coronary disease. In the future, this will help having a ranking of European Hospitals offering the best medical healthcare in this field. This is key to guarantee and improve the quality of healthcare provided to citizens throughout Europe,” explains Jaume Marrugat.

To define these indicators, researchers have used different registry databases of patients from 70 European hospitals, allowing for the study of more than 27,000 cases related to the treatment of certain cardiovascular diseases and the commonly used procedures, such as angiography, thrombolysis, percutaneous interventions, etc.

Each year some 2,000 deaths occur in the European Union from coronary disease and in the population aged 35 to 64, 700,000 new cases appear each year. EURHOBOP can be a key tool in guaranteeing and improving the quality of healthcare to European citizens. Currently, we already have a tool that can be used in each hospital individually and confidentially. This tool adjusts to the characteristics of the patients seeking healthcare in the centre, those of the hospital itself, and those of the country where the hospital is. It doesn’t require a great deal of data, which are usually available even on administrative databases. If the European administration and hospitals are able to reach an agreement, it would only be necessary to come up with a ranking of hospitals that could be made public and would offer patients tools to choose which centre offers the best healthcare to treat coronary diseases.

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