On Tuesday May 15th, Nextep organized a breakfast with Dr. Christina Akerman, President of the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) at the Cercle de l’Union Interalliée in downtown Paris, which gathered several Presidents & Market Access Executives of major pharmaceutical companies.

Opening the event, Guy Eiferman, Partner at Nextep, presented the general context of the healthcare sector globally and in France. He shed some light on the apparent paradox between the necessity to create value “beyond the pill”, and the actual implementation of this concept. Real life outcome measurement is seen as a critical missing piece in current product evaluations, as well as a way to align all stakeholders on the value created by therapeutic interventions. An open question remains about which standards should be applied.  This is where ICHOM can play an important role.

Dr. Christina Akerman outlined the reasoning behind the creation of ICHOM several years ago as a non-profit organization funded Professor Michael Porter (Harvard Business School), the Boston Consulting Group and Professor Martin Ingvar (Karolinska Institute) and presented the two-fold mission of ICHOM: i) defining global standard sets of outcome measures and ii) driving their adoption worldwide.

The task of the ICHOM is to unlock the potential of value-based healthcare systems by facilitating the definition of global standards sets to measure outcomes that really matter to patients, for all relevant medical conditions. As such, the ICHOM’s approach is built on a framework which has been developed by Professor Michael Porter in his spearheading 2006 book “Redefining Healthcare”, which outlines the argument for aligning all stakeholders around value creation.

Dr. Akerman added that outcomes are a powerful lever to focus care delivery to the services that matter the most to patients. But according to her analyses, this is not what is going on today. Truth is, outcomes, and especially patient-reported outcomes, are significantly under-represented in clinical trials. However, in order to move to a value-based healthcare system, we need to find a better way of measuring them. This is quite a challenge, but it is worth the effort: patient-reported outcomes are key to help improve patient care, enhance physician-patient relationships and overall improve survival or other critical indicators of outcomes.

She went on exposing how outcome measurement drives improvements in value for all stakeholders: patients will choose their treatment & providers based on expected outcomes, clinicians will improve quality of care by comparing performance, hospitals will differentiate into areas where they deliver superior outcomes, and payers will negotiate contracts based on results and encourage innovation.

The ICHOM team, led by Dr. Christina Akerman, is completely redefining what success in healthcare means, by focusing on health outcomes. Based on the analysis that health problems are similar globally, but the way we handle them can be different, experts and patients from around the world have been brought together to help define these outcomes. So far, ICHOM standard sets, covering now over 50% of global disease burden, are considered one of the gold standards and are available free of charge (open source), to help promote their global adoption. Indeed, ICHOM is also driving adoption through multiple strategic and sponsoring partnerships with government organizations, scientific societies, private and public healthcare institutions. The most recent of these agreements is with EFPIA in the area of Education of all stakeholders to the importance of measuring outcomes to improve value.

Nextep is looking forward to being a leading force in supporting all healthcare stakeholders in the journey towards value based systems as Dr. Akerman’s presentation was “in no way the conclusion but the start of something new”.