CCHE Seminar Series: Using patient-level population-representative data for international health systems comparisons: findings and lessons for Canadian healthcare
Using patient-level population-representative data for international health systems comparisons: findings and lessons for Canadian healthcare
Peter Cram
University of Texas Medical Branch, University of Toronto
Friday March 24th, 2023, 10am-12pm, HSB 108 and Zoom
Abstract: Comparing different countries’ health care systems (aka, international health system comparisons) is challenging; it requires identifying performance metrics, identifying suitable data sources from 2-or-more countries, and ensuring comparability of measures. At the same time, international health system comparisons can reveal unexpected performance gaps and catalyze improvement. In this seminar I will review the history of international health system comparisons and describe key questions that international comparisons can help to answer. I will review a number of the most common data sources that have historically be used for international comparisons and discuss their strengths and limitations. I will then discuss the movement towards using distributed (federated) research networks to analyze population-representative patient-level data as an alternative approach. I will review some of the recent research in this space by our team (IHSRC), ICCONIC and others. We will review learnings and potential policy implications for Canada.
Peter Cram is the Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, TX and an adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He was on faculty at the University of Iowa (2002-2013) and Director of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics at Sinai Health System and University Health Network at the University of Toronto (2014-2021). Dr. Cram was previously a Robert Wood Johnson Physician Faculty Scholar and competed a Health and Aging Policy Fellowship in the office of Congressman Lloyd Doggett. His research focuses on variation in utilization, outcomes, and cost for hospital-based services. Dr. Cram is the co-founder of the international health system research collaborative (IHSRC) with Bruce Landon from Harvard (https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/ihsrc).