in recognition of a distinguished career for scholarly contributions to the healthcare performance assessment, the italian ministry of health has appointed MILENA VAINIERI AS NATIONAL PROJECT MANAGER for the “paris” project

The Italian Ministry of Health has appointed Milena Vainieri as national project manager for the PaRIS - Patient reported indicator survey project launched by OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) in 2017. This appointment recognizes her major accomplishments and research activity carried out at the Sant’Anna School Institute of Management and the MeS Laboratory for healthcare performance evaluation.

Milena Vainieri, who is currently serving as Coordinator of the MeS Laboratory, will develop and manage all aspects of the “PaRIS” project and program engagement in planning and collecting patient-reported healthcare quality indicators, with the goal of making health systems more person-centered. Questionnaires are given to patients to allow comparison of outcomes pre and post health services and interventions. The use of reported outcome measures (PROMs) and patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) across clinical effectiveness, safety, and patient experience are focused on service improvement.

To benchmark international performance across diverse policy areas, patients are asked to ascertain perceptions of their health status, perceived level of impairment, disability, and health-related quality of life. The patient’s understanding of health care ‘value’ in terms of effectiveness has potential advantages for engaging clinicians about (un)expected impacts of PROMs to guide implementation and evaluation at all levels. More specifically, PROMs routine measurement is not always achieved and clinical significance of health-related quality of life scores are not always reported lacking in score feedback and difficulty in the score interpretation.

The “PaRIS” project priority groups will be patients facing life-threatening and progressing illnesses, patients who have experienced stroke, heart attack, breast cancer, robot-assisted surgery, hip and knee replacements, and mental illness. Clinical decision-making will be based on what patients value most in their hospital care and their answer to more meaningful question such as “What matters to you?” more than “What is the matter with you?”

Since 2018, researchers of the MeS Lab. have conducted a cross-sectional survey of the PREMs and PROMs among Tuscany hospitals and patients in many Veneto region hospitals. The MeS Lab. close collaboration with national and international partners will ensure state of the art indicators and surveys for new benchmarks of health system performance.