Seminar 2010
New thougths on health comparison
The result of the Nordic seminar Patient Choice and Comparisons was new thoughts on patient comparison. Participants from the Nordic countries and Great Britain participated with ideas of the future.
The seminar started with a presentation from the Swedish site minpension.se, which is a site with individual pension statements and projections. The site has managed to explain the complex area of pensions in a way that is possible to understand for everyone.
After this lecture we went to the health area, and stayed there for the rest of the day. Johan Hjertqvist from Health Consumer Powerhouse presented their new study How to choose the best hospital. They have explored health information portals in EU, and found that only five countries have nation-wide information portals about health care quality.
None of the portals match every criteria set up by HCP, but they are all good examples of some kind. Weisse liste in Germany has a good way to show treatment quality. Dutch Independer shows patient satisfaction, Brittish NHS Choices has patient comments (and much more) and Danish Sundhedskvalitet shows waiting times in an easily accessible way.
Robert Cleary and Emma Doyle from NHS Choices followed Johan Hjertqvist. NHS is the most developed health information portal in Europe. Robert Cleary highlighted some of the reasons to this, for example user-focus and a positive attitude to what you can do with data, even if it’s not perfect.
The day concluded with a workshop. The participants discussed patient choice and the future of comparison sites. The groups came up with different ideas on how the comparison sites could look like in ten years. One idea was to that the comparison sites could be a decision support adjusted to the patient’s situation. Another more hands-on suggestion was to combine comparison with the possibility to book an appointment. These and the other ideas suggest an interesting future.
The day started with a whish from Johan Calltorp, chairman of OmVård.se’s medical board. He hoped that this meeting could be the start of an exiting collaboration between the attending countries. Let's see what happens next year!
