The EUBIROD Network has collaborated in various initiatives led by the OECD Health Division.
Quality measurement in Diabetes
In October 2010, we liaised with OECD expert groups to present the BIRO approach
as best practice to standardise data exchange for quality measurement.
In 2012, the OECD invited EUBIROD to present at the European Diabetes Leadership Forum 2012,
held in Copenhagen in collaboration with WHO Europe and Novo Nordisk .
The Conference led to the "Copenhagen Roadmap", a document that
was used to drive new policy initiatives in Europe.
In 2014, a collaboration between officers of the Italian Ministry of Health and the EUBIROD Network delivered a small R&D project
to revise the standardised definitions of
Lower Extremity Amputation in Diabetes.
In 2015, following approval of the Expert Group on Health Care Quality Indicators ,
the new definitions were implemented for the regular publication of Lower Extremity Amputation Rates in Diabetes in
Health at a Glance.
In 2020, a scientific paper presented the details of amputation rates obtained using the new OECD standardized definitions.
Health data governance
The relevance of EUBIROD for health data governance was another element of interest for the OECD. Members of the Secretariat contributed intensely
to the work undertaken on information infrastructure.
The first contribution was a chapter in a volume published in 2013, where BIRO was mentioned as a solution to compare
diabetes outcomes
within a multi-country
privacy enhanced infrastructure.
A debate on the consequences of the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for international comparisons led to the
production of a scientific paper in 2014.
Between 2014-2016, the collaboration continued with the productive participation to the
Advisory Board of the Health Information Infrastructure, an expert group contributing to a specialised monograph emerging from the materials of a
key Workshop on Health Data Governance
hosted at OECD Headquarters. Participants included national privacy authorities, academics, industrial representatives and members of the
EUBIROD Secretariat in the roles of Moderator and Panelist.
The publication resulting from the workshop was a milestone volume,
in which EUBIROD provided input for new guidelines for health data governance, based on the principles of
privacy perfomance assessment.
The report paved the ground for the final
Recommendations on Health Data Governance
delivered at the OECD Ministerial Conference in January 2017.
In June 2017, as a part of the Bridge Health project, colleagues already involved in the OECD Advisory Board
participated to a Workshop Meeting held in Nicosia, Cyprus .
The workshop delivered comprehensive approach of Privacy and Performance Assessment, whose contents have been published in a scientific paper in 2020.
Methodology for international data collection
The BIRO approach provided valuable input to new forms of international data collection at the OECD.
In 2015, the OECD strived to identify a privacy enhanced solution to collect international data at sub-national level to measure hospital performance
benchmarking.
To receive advise on a complex matter, colleagues of the Health Division organized an Expert Meeting hosted by the University of Surrey
involving referents from relevant international projects, including EUBIROD.
In that occasion, F.Carinci presented a revised form of the BIRO approach as a solution for the OECD data collection .
In 2016, the idea was taken up by the OECD with the implementation of a
two-step method
that allowed to deliver a report on Global Hospital Performance Benchmarking.
