Five Dutch hospitals have joined forces to provide optimal healthcare for people suffering from Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). This will be done using IBDream, which is both a personal online file and a research register. IBDream currently serves 2,000 patients. The aim is to reach as many as 5,000 people by 2020, by having more hospitals join the scheme. Pharmaceutical company Janssen is supporting the IBDream hospitals in realising this ambition, and Vintura consultancy has provided the project management.
IBDream gives medical professionals a good overview of the treatment and outcomes, both for individual patients and for the whole patient population. Insights into the progression of the disease also help patients to better understand their condition, and access to anonymised data enables pharmaceutical companies to develop innovative IBD therapies and offer them in an effective manner. For these reasons, in recent years IBDream has been sponsored by several pharmaceutical companies (AbbVie, Celgene, Takeda, Pfizer, Janssen, Dr Falk, MundiPharma, MSD) and ZonMW, a government agency that funds health research.
Creation of IBD Database
In 2011, Dr Rachel West, Tessa Römkens and Jeroen Jansen established the initial IBD database at the Franciscus Gasthuis and Vlietland Rotterdam, the Jeroen Bosch Hospital, and the Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis. Subsequently, Medisch Spectrum Twente and the Radboudumc joined the project, led by Dr Maurice Russel and Dr Frank Hoentjen, and the database expanded to become IBDream. The main reasons for setting up IBDream were to give IBD patients the best possible healthcare in a way that suited their individual needs, and to keep healthcare affordable.
Project IBDream 2.0
The next step, Project IBDream 2.0, is now under way, and involves extending the scope and content of the register. Dr Frank Hoentjen, gastroenterologist at Radboudumc Nijmegen and IBDream board member, explains: “The aim of this project is to further improve the user-friendliness of IBDream and make full use of everything it has to offer. In concrete terms, one of our aims is to serve 5,000 patients with IBDream by 2020, by collaborating with another five new hospitals.”
Contribution to value-driven healthcare
Janssen is providing financial support for the IBDream 2.0 project, and Janssen and Vintura are both sharing their expertise and tools with IBDream to promote innovation and improve healthcare. In this, they are motivated by their mutual ambition to contribute to value-driven healthcare as a way of keeping healthcare both affordable and innovative.
“Janssen wants to contribute to a future in which healthcare is funded based on the actual value for the patient, or in other words, a Dutch healthcare landscape based on the principles of Value-based Healthcare,” says Michel Van Agthoven, Director External Affairs Netherlands at Janssen-Cilag B.V. in Breda.
