BRIDGE Health

The BRidging Information and Data Generation for Evidence-based Health policy and research (BRIDGE Health) project aims to prepare the transition towards a sustainable and integrated EU health information system for both public health and research purposes.

Aim of the project

The overall aim of BRIDGE Health is to work towards a comprehensive, integrated and sustainable EU-Health information structure, supporting evidence-based health policy and research for the EU and Member States. The project includes 31 partners in 16 countries. The project bridges the best of EU projects in domains of population and health system monitoring, indicator development, health examination surveys, environment and health, population injury and disease registries, clinical and administrative health data collection systems and methods of health systems monitoring and evaluation. You can read more about BRIDGE Health here.

The Health Economics and Policy research group is part of a sub-project within BRIDGE Health (Work Package 11). The aim of this sub-project is to develop a coherent methodology to integrate health information systems from existing data sources, covering both population- and disease-based data from administrative, survey and registry sources. The sub-project is updating and further developing the EuroHOPE (European Health Care Outcomes, Performance and Efficiency) research infrastructure.

Results in brief

We have compared alternative hospital-level performance indicators of 30-day mortality for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in Finland, Hungary, Italy, Norway and Sweden. Our results show remarkable differences between the various measures and it is demonstrated, that the methodology plays a significant role when assessing performance. The study showed that ranking hospitals is sensitive to the definitions made, starting from the data collection and inclusion criteria, definition of the outcome measure, and ending up with differences due to risk-adjustment methods. Therefore, when presenting performance measures, the methods of the approach at hand need to be carefully explained and the measures need to be transparent.

In a pilot study, we have also extended the episode-based approach to include primary health care and social services using data from four metropolitan areas: Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm. The methodological innovation of this pilot study was the linking of hospital and cause-of-death registers to the registers of primary and long-term care by the use of personal identification numbers, which makes it feasible to analyse the patients’ care pathways at different levels of care and for a period that covers one year before and one year after the onset of a disease. The study shows that for patients with mixed care pathways across primary, secondary, tertiary and social services, performance comparison with data only from secondary and tertiary care is not always reliable for international comparisons. According to our results, there exist differences in various performance indicators between the four areas, and the ranking is sensitive to risk-adjustment method.

Reports and publications

A performance comparison of patient pathways in Nordic capital areas - a pilot study for ischaemic stroke patients.
Häkkinen U, Goude F, Hagen TP, Kruse M, Moger T, Peltola M, et al
Scand J Public Health 2020 Jan;():1403494819863523

Häkkinen, U., Engel-Andreasen, C., Goude, F., Hagen, T.P., Kruse, M., Moger, T., Peltola, M. & Rehnberg, C. (2018). Performance comparison of patient pathways in Nordic capital areas - A pilot study. National Institute for Health and Welfare.

Contact person

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Fanny Goude

Affiliated to Research
Fanny Goude
29-03-2023