… What is the ECHO Project? Financed by the European Union 7th Framework Programme and led by the Institute for Health Sciences in Aragon (IACS) Spain, ECHO Consortium is made up of a combination of public institutions and high education organisations with a strong background on public health, health services and health economics research, policy analysis and knowledge brokering. The European Collaboration for Health Optimization (ECHO) is an international project aimed at analysing and assessing healthcare performance within and across European countries. ECHO Project Scientific Coordinator: Enrique Bernal Delgado, MD PhD @EU_ECHOhealth [email protected] www.echo-health.eu www.echo-health.eu www.echo-health.eu The European Healthcare agenda is set up on three big pillars: strengthening healthcare effectiveness, increasing accessibility and improving resilience. Underpinning those three elements, the assessment of health systems’ performance and the routinely use of existing health information systems. ECHO is widely aligned with this agenda and provides instruments to inform policy decisions on health-care inequalities, effectiveness, quality, safety and efficiency. Methods Based upon routinely collected administrative data, ECHO conducts a variety of observational studies (ecological and cross-section with associated time-series) to analyze either the population exposure to healthcare or patients’ outcomes. For that purpose, ECHO has built a homogeneous data infrastructure with 200 million patient episodes, all of them geo-localized into the place of residence and hospital of treatment, has developed coding crosswalks to allow comparisons across 6 coding languages, has hospital of treatment, has developed coding crosswalks to allow comparisons across six coding languages, has mapped meaningful healthcare geographic areas enabling sound cross-country analyses, and has estimated robust benchmarks to allow learning and exchange. report analyzing the original sources of information and describing the ECHO data infrastructure, and the map of codes that has been used to compose the set of ECHO performance indicators. In Europe, the place of residence determines the population exposure to effective and safe care. In Europe, the hospital where a patient is admitted makes a difference in the odds of getting better or worse care. European citizens are facing high opportunity costs in those areas producing high rates of low-value care. Acces ECHO Web-Tool via echo-health.eu ECHO policy-oriented outputs At this point in time, ECHO has produced several outputs that might be of interest for policy making. Available at the website are a series of Atlases showing unwarranted variations in performance within and across countries, a report analyzing the original sources of information and describing the ECHO data infrastructure, and the map of codes that has been used to compose the set of ECHO performance indicators. ECHO has also developed a Web-Tool that allows the implementation of customized analyses, comparing incountry and cross-country providers, both at geographic and hospital level. www.echo-health.eu ECHO has proven to be a powerful tool in the assessment of Healthcare Systems Performance across Europe, upgrading existing experiences and tools.