Dr. Stefan Larsson

Progress in Healthcare requires focus on outcomes that matter to patients

Bio

Stefan Larsson, MD, PhD, is co-founder of the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM). He is an independent advisor in health care and life sciences, and a senior advisor to Boston Consulting Group (BCG).  Previously, he worked for 24 years at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) where he was the founder and first global leader of the firm’s health care payers and providers sector and its health care systems sector. 

He is also a Distinguished Fellow in the World Economic Forum’s Health and Healthcare team.  Stefan is co-author of the upcoming book, The Patient Priority, addressing the growing crises confronting the global health care sector and why we must put the patient and the delivery of outcomes that matter to patients at the forefront.  He is an Associate Professor at the Karolinska Institute, from where he has MD and PhD.  Stefan also trained at Harvard Medical School, MRC-Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh and EMBL Heidelberg.

Abstract summary

Healthcare systems around the world are facing a crisis with growing costs and complexity as well as difficulties recruiting and retaining qualified staff. However, a growing number of health care organizations around the world are using the systematic measurement of health outcomes that matter to patients — and the costs required to deliver those outcomes — as a catalyst for innovation and continuous improvement. Several pioneering initiatives have been seen in Opthalmology, eg. the Swedish Cataract registry and the EUREQUO project. This value-based health care movement is transforming how providers deliver care and assess their performance, how payers design payment models, how pharma and med-tech define their offerings and business models, and how clinical researchers conduct clinical trials. 

This talk will argue that broad use of internationally standardized measures of outcomes that matter to patients is the Archimedes’ lever required to address the key strategic challenges of leaders across healthcare. It allows us to redefine and assess innovations – so we focus more on the impact on results in daily clinial practice. It helps us make our care delivery more financially sustainable, by enabling the elimination of wasteful clinical routines and practices. It provides a patient-centric definition of “Quality of care” and a better base to assess patient safety. Finally, by aligning our definition of quality and success with the purpose of healthcare professionals, we raise the motivation and engagement of clinal staff.