E-QUALITY
E-QUALITY: ECCO Quality of Care Project 
The E-QUALITY project is a new initiative of the European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation to ultimately improve the quality of care of patients living with Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD). With this project, ECCO goes back to its historic mission: To improve the care of all patients with IBD in all its aspects through international guidelines for practice, education, research and collaboration in the area of IBD.
AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) have provided unrestricted grants towards this independent Programme.
Learn more: In ECCO’23 Oral Presentation 19: Gaps between ECCO Quality Standards of Care and the real world data: E-QUALITY Survey
Current project stage: at ECCO’23 onsite, 47 additional participant centres have signed up for the 2nd phase of the survey rounds of the E-QUALITY project. This survey round will be started at the end of June – with the aim to complete the data analysis for the ECCO’24 Abstract Submission.
E-QUALITY Taskforce:
Gionata Fiorino, Italy; Alissa Walsh, United Kingdom; Catarina Fidalgo, Portugal; Marc Ferrante, Belgium; Johan Burisch, Denmark;
Sophie Restellini, Switzerland; Henit Yanai, Israel; Lihi Godny, Israel; Dror Shouval, Israel; Francesca Rosini, Italy; Michel Adamina, Switzerland; Omar Faiz, United Kingdom; Susanna Jäghult, Sweden; David Drobne, Slovenia; Marietta Iacucci, United Kingdom; Manuel Barreiro Acosta, Spain
Two major steps:
1) Current practice vs. ECCO Recommendations: Identifying the gaps
First step - ECCO will focus on identifying the gaps between the quality of standards as defined by ECCO Statements, and the current practice in daily clinical care. The results will be published in the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis (JCC).
2) Fill the gaps
Second step - having identified the gaps, ECCO will aim at setting up educational tools and/or activities to fill them. This step will be planned further after the completion of the first step.
The overall estimated duration of the project is 3 to 5 years.
Which papers and tools will be used by ECCO to identify the gaps?
1) ECCO’s Recommendations
ECCO’s Recommendations in term of Quality Standards of Care were published in August 2020 in the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis “Quality of Care Standards in Inflammatory Bowel Disease: a European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation Position Paper”. In this Position Statement, ECCO listed 111 quality standards that represent the optimum quality of care according to ECCO, grouped into three main domains:
i) Structure (IBD Core team, interdisciplinary team, IBD facilities)
ii) Process (any process related to IBD, such as diagnosis, monitoring, special situations) and
iii) Outcomes (objectives and quality measures able to quantify the effectiveness of structures and processes)
2) Real World data on clinical practice – UR-CARE
ECCO plans on comparing its recommendations with real-world data collected in the United Registries for Clinical Assessment and Research (UR-CARE), which was launched by ECCO in 2017. UR-CARE is a patient database accessible online which offers comprehensive data collection for patients diagnosed with Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis and unclassified IBD through extensive forms. It is meant for individual centres, to support the management of patients on a daily basis, and for academic study groups, to perform retrospective studies. For the E-QUALITY project, data which has already been collected will be used retrospectively to compare current clinical practice and ECCO’s Recommendations.
Stay tuned for the first outcomes of this important initiative!