EU Projects
The iBMG participates in various EU Projects. You can find an overview below.
CBHI: Community based Health Insurance
The Community Based Health Insurance (CBHI) project is aimed at evaluating an innovative health insurance system in India that is based on solidarity. iBMG further broadened its research-horizon to the African continent by establishing partnerships with the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), the Africa Study Center, the Ethiopian Economics Association and Addis Ababa University. Jointly, these partners and iBMG work on an NWO-funded project on the evaluation of CBHI in Ethiopia. Furthermore, iBMG works closely together with the Amsterdam Institute for International Development in evaluating insurance schemes in Kenia. The knowledge acquired through all these projects is highly valuable to support policy makers. They are facing the challenges of addressing major public health issues in the context of ever increasing financial and human resource constraints.
Click here to visit the CBHI website
HEFPA: Health Equity and Financial Protection in Asia
The Health Equity and Financial Protection in Asia (HEFPA) project focuses on the effects of large-scale health care reforms in six Asian countries. The evaluation of the so-called New Cooperative Medical Scheme, which was introduced in rural China, is the central issue in the HEFPA project. This insurance system aims to insure farmers against the catastrophic consequences of illness and hopes to provide better access to medical care. Within this project, researchers from iBMG, Shandong University and Oxford University are working together to design experiments that will allow successful evaluation of both demand and supply side interventions that are aimed at improving the programme’s impact on the access to medical care and financial protection.
Click here to visit the HEFPA website
EuroDRG: Diagnosis-Related Groups in Europe: towards Efficiency and Quality
Payment mechanisms represent one of the fundamental building blocks of any health system, introducing powerful incentives for actors in the system and fierce technical design complexities. Inpatient case payments mainly referred to as Diagnose Related Groups (DRGs), are nowadays used as a payment mechanism with ambitious aims: they seek to reimburse providers fairly for the work they undertake, but intend to encourage efficient delivery and to discourage the provision of unnecessary services and thereby target to overcome some of the drawbacks of more traditional hospital reimbursement. A case payment system that fulfils these hopes requires carefully balanced incentives as well as a methodologically sound system. Especially, DRGs need to accurately reflect the resources and costs of treating a given patient.
The EuroDRG project scrutinises these challenges. Part one concentrates on the complexities of case payments for hospitals in general. Special emphasis is put on identifying those factors, which are crucial for:
(1) calculating adequate case payments,
(2) examining hospital efficiency within countries and across Europe fairly,
(3) study the relationship between costs and the quality of care provided in hospitals.
The project uses comparative analyses of DRG systems across 10 European countries embedded in various types
of health systems (Austria, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK).
The second part of the project seeks to identify pan-European issues in hospital case payment and includes conducting efficiency analysis across European countries, establishing a European hospital benchmarking club as well as identifying
those systemic factors, which will be crucial for successful policy design in a slowly emerging pan-European hospital market.
Click here to visit the EuroDRG website
Managed outcomes: Health care outcomes and cost benefits
The project explores the assumption that healthcare outcomes and costs are affected by the efficiency of service production, the regional structure of healthcare delivery, and the degree people are empowered to participate in the co-production of their care. The principal method is comparative case studies and the project aims to develop scenarios and models of future healthcare systems. Impacts are methods for benchmarking healthcare production and distribution practices across Europe, to further the exchange of best practices across cultural contexts, demand-based tools for designing healthcare systems, and knowledge on the impacts of service channels on health outcomes and cost-benefits.
Click here to visit the Managed Outcomes website
EU-pact: A pharmacogenomic approach to coumarin anticoagulant therapy
The effectiveness of treatment with oral anticoagulants in the prevention of thrombotic disorders is well established, but these drugs are potentially dangerous because of their narrow therapeutic index. In Europe three coumarins are used: warfarin, acenocoumarol, and phenprocoumon. Genetic factors that have been recently demonstrated to change the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of coumarins are the presence of polymorphisms in the genes encoding for CYP2C9 and VKOR (vitamin K epoxide reductase complex). Polymorphisms in these genes are associated with increased risk for severe overanticoagulation and bleedings. A clinical trial will be performed in seven European countries to determine whether knowledge of the genotype of patients at the start of coumarin treatment will increase the safety of use of these compounds and whether such gene testing is cost-effective. Patients will be randomized to receive treatment with a coumarin either dosed with an algorithm that does not include information on their genotype, or with an algorithm that does contain this information. The primary outcome will be time within therapeutic INR range. Secondary outcomes include INR>4 and bleedings
Click here to visit the EU-pact website
QUASER: Quality and safety in European Union Hospitals
QUASER (Quality and Safety in European Union Hospitals) is a comparative study of five European countries and funded by the EU framework program 7. The QUASER study is a multi-level (macro, meso and micro-system), longitudinal comparative study of the ‘quality of hospital care,’ i.e. the effectiveness, safety and patient experience of hospital care.
The QUASER project was launched in April 2010. Its participants - next to the Institute of Health Policy and Management of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam –include the Kings College (London), the Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality (Imperial College, London), the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (Lisbon), Qulturum (Jongkoping county Council, Sweden), and the Department of Health Studies (University of Stavanger, Norway).
Click here to visit the QUASER website.
Reaal: Make it ReAAL
ReAAL is funded by the European CIP-ICT-PSP implementation call of 2012. The project has as main objective to evaluate the socio-economic impact of an open source platform in the area of active and independent living (also called Ambient Assisted Living, AAL). ReAAL builds on a broad consortium of countries, including Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and the UK.
In the course of 36 months, ReAAL will deploy several open-source applications in the field of active and independent living at several pilot sites. All together, the pilots will involve approx. 7000 users in 7 countries, including the Rijnmond Region in the Netherlands. A key deliverable of ReAAL is to collect best practices concerning technical and organizational aspects associated with deployment and public procurement of open source AAL applications. The goal is to enable optimization of existing value chains and business models. The project will make findings and recommendations publicly available via a knowledge portal that will serve as main European reference for best practices and lessons learned with regards to large-scale rollouts with interoperability focus.
iBMG’s department of HSMO takes the lead in the project evaluation. This will encompass validating the role of open source platforms in achieving interoperability and measuring the related socio-economic impact. The evaluation framework will be multidimensional, thus also taking into consideration impacts related to ethical, legal, market, user experience, and organizational aspects.
ReAAL begun in January 2013 and has a three-year duration
Any questions about EU projects or procedures? Please feel free to contact Sonja Meeuwsen (meeuwsen@bmg.eur.nl, 010-4081169)
