European Community Health Indicator Monitoring System (ECHIM)

ECHIM was a three-year project funded by European Union to develop and implement health indicators and health monitoring in the EU and all EU Member States. It continued the work of the ECHI and ECHI-2 projects. The ECHIM core group had 25 members from different countries of which the University of Brighton was a member.

The general objective of ECHIM was to consolidate and expand the ECHI Indicator system towards a sustainable health monitoring system in Europe. The focus was on collecting and disseminating comparable health data and information based on the ECHI shortlist. The work was carried out in close collaboration with Member States, the European Commission, Eurostat, WHO, OECD and other international organisations with the aim of supporting the EU Health Strategy.

Specific objectives of this core group were to:

> Promote the co-ordination of the WP7 projects and the relevance of the work of all other working parties, support liaison with working party leaders, and make proposals for necessary developments and their implementation.
> Carry out development work on health indicators and health monitoring (HIM).
> Promote the setting up of the health monitoring infrastructures to ensure collaboration with and between member states, their public health institutes and statistical offices as well as DG Sanco, Eurostat, WHO and OECD.
> Promote the setting up and operation of needed topic specific permanent networks.
> Plan health monitoring activities and pave the way for the forthcoming health monitoring structure.

Achievements of the European Community Health Indicator Monitoring System included

> A network of health indicator experts comprising all Member States
> A new release of the ECHI shortlist and the Documentation Sheets: indicator definitions, preferred data sources, calculations, availability info and other metadata descriptions
> A review of and recommendations for data gathering, quality assurance, analysis, dissemination and reporting
> ECHIM Products website and database (previously the ICHI database) The information gathered by the Country Reports, ECHIM Survey and Bilateral
Discussions was summed up in the Country Specific Section, which aims to create a clear overview of the situation in each country and to serve as a starting point for future plans for the implementation of the ECHI indicators
> Final report of the ECHIM project including proposals for implementation
Recommendations for improvements of the ECHI shortlist indicators, data gathering, reporting and information dissemination
> ECHIM became a well known brand among European health indicator experts