European Collaboration for Healthcare Optimization
ECHO aimed at building a common knowledge infrastructure based on existing datasets, which ultimately allowed international healthcare performance comparisons.
Conceived as a pilot study, ECHO set about the task of bringing together patient-level data from Denmark, England, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain, and contextual information -demographic, socioeconomic, and healthcare supply data.
This knowledge infrastructure allows evaluating more than 40 performance indicators, carefully developed to avoid inappropriate cross-country comparisons.