Evaluating Care Across Borders

Background

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© ECAB

When deciding whether to seek health care in another Member State, citizens of the European Union should be able to make informed choices, relying on straightforward administrative and clinical processes and the guarantee that the care they receive will be continuous. At present, however, there are substantial gaps in the documentation of existing cross-border collaborations and in the knowledge of the procedures that are important in cross-border care. To address this deficit, the present study identifies and analyses cooperative arrangements that aim to facilitate the transfer of patients, providers, products, services, funding or knowledge across borders between actors in a range of EU countries.

Aims

The aim of ECAB is to facilitate a process whereby Europe's citizens can make informed choices about seeking health care in another Member State and to ensure that the administrative and clinical processes of obtaining care are straightforward and continuous. It was inspired by the recent Proposal for a Directive on the application of patient rights in cross-border healthcare and is supported by the existing body of research on cross-border care. The project focuses on those areas where necessary information is incomplete and seeks to fill the gaps.

Methodology

The project comprises two types of work packages, in addition to the usual ones such as launch, management and dissemination. The first set looks at a series of key issues that need to be understood within Member States, if cross-border health care is to function. These include how health professionals are regulated and how patients can seek redress if things go wrong (WP1), what sort of treatment patients can expect to receive (WP2), what information is collected on the patient and whether this is obtainable, useable, and understandable to other health professionals (WP3), how medicines are prescribed (WP4), and how patients can obtain information about the quality of providers (WP5). In each of these work packages, research draw on previous experience, especially from the Europe for Patients project and will comprise two stages. The first will provide an overview mechanisms in place in as many Member States as possible. The second is a more detailed examination of how procedures work in practice in a smaller number of Member States. 

The second set of work packages looks in detail at four models of cross-border care, in each case exploring the issues that arose in the first set of work packages. These models are long-term care (WP6), hospital care (using a range of existing collaborations) (WP7), telemedicine (WP8), and dentistry (WP9).

Work Packages

Partners

LSE Health: The London School of Economics and Political Science - Health centre, United Kingdom
OBS: European Observatory on Health Systems & Policies, Belgium/Denmark
LSHTM: London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicines, United Kingdom
OSE: Observatoire Social Europeen, Belgium
UM: Universiteit Maastricht, The Netherlands
TUB: Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
ECSW: European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, Austria
UB: University of Barcelona (Universitat de Barcelona), Spain
IVZ-RS: Institute of Public health of The Republic of Slovenia, Slovenia
PRAXIS: PRAXIS Center for Policy Studies, Estonia
STAKES: National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health, Finland
Semmelweis: Semmelweis Egyetem, Hungary
VED: Regione del Veneto