18 November 2020

King’s Health Partners Diabetes, Endocrinology and Obesity will play a leading role in a Europe-wide project giving patients more of a voice on the care they receive and the healthcare systems they are part of.

The Health Outcomes Observatory (H2O) brings together 23 partners across Europe, including university hospitals, patient groups, and pharmaceutical industry, for a two-year project collecting patient-reported data. The project is the first of its kind to work across multiple European countries, collecting patient outcomes and incorporating them into healthcare decision making – at both individual and population level.

The initial area of focus for the project will be inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, and diabetes, which is being led by the King’s Health Partners Diabetes, Endocrinology and Obesity.

The H2O project has the potential to significantly improve health outcomes for patients. This is central to King’s Health Partners five-year plan – delivering better health for all through high impact innovation - and builds on one of our key cross-cutting programmes of work: Value Based Healthcare. As world leaders in diabetes research, education, and care, supporting a diverse population of more than two million people, our Institute is extremely well-positioned to lead on the initial phase of this project.

King’s Health Partners Diabetes, Endocrinology and Obesity’s delivery team for the project will include clinical and academic colleagues from across King’s Health Partners, as well as colleagues from the King’s College London Centre for Translational Informatics who will be supporting with the complex technology required for capturing such large amounts of data.

The project will provide patients with an app that can be downloaded independently and used at the partner hospitals and beyond. Patients are therefore able to easily measure the outcomes that matter to them, and communicate these outcomes to physicians of their choosing, who they know and trust.

The evidence-based format that will be designed for this communication ensures that data can be aggregated and anonymised to help inform future healthcare interventions, both for the individual patient and those with similar health conditions.

Patients, supported by their healthcare professionals, will be able to compare their progress with other patients with similar health conditions using the data. This allows doctors and patients to better align on the right course of action, giving patients more of a voice and enabling them to inform their healthcare interventions, based on the outcomes that matter to them. The aggregated data will also form the basis for new research and the development of innovative evidence-based treatments.

For this initial phase of the project, King’s Health Partners clinicians will provide vital expert insight into the specific outcomes that will be measured. The Institute team will devise and implement a robust programme management approach, which is essential to the success of such a complex project working across multiple health systems.

The H2O partnership is led by the Medical University of Vienna and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited. It has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Institute, the world’s largest public-private partnership in life sciences, and is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations and JDRF.

Dr David Hopkins, Director of King’s Health Partners Diabetes, Endocrinology and Obesity, said:

Improving care pathways for people with diabetes and obesity is a priority for our Institute. A project of this magnitude, which amplifies the voices of patients so that we can determine and prioritise the outcomes that matter to them, is a significant step towards achieving this.

Prof Tanja Stamm, Head of the Section for Outcomes Research, Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics and Intelligent Systems at the Medical University of Vienna, said:

For the first time, we will collect patient-reported data on the large scale in four European countries. We will unify the fragmented European outcome data to better serve patients and other stakeholders and initiate a more competitive outcomes research environment in Europe.

Within the two-year span of the project, the H2O partnership plans to set up independent data platforms - the Observatories - in Austria, Germany, The Netherlands, and Spain.

Find out more about King’s Health Partners’ commitment to Value Based Healthcare.