Interview with Femke Oldenziel
Real-World Evidence Lead, LOGEX
The power of real-world data for evidence-based decision-making is increasingly apparent in healthcare. It can reflect real-life patient experiences across a large and very diverse population.
Real-world data allows for a more comprehensive view of effectiveness and safety, enabling healthcare providers to make more informed decisions and deliver better healthcare outcomes. Clinicians, medical policymakers, life science companies and patients are all eager to gather and share data and turn that data into better healthcare.
However, a lack of reliable infrastructure and standardisation hinders progress. Fortunately, there are innovative solutions to address this challenge, as explained by Femke Oldenziel, Real-World Evidence Lead at LOGEX.
What sparked your interest in real-world evidence (RWE)?
During my decade as a healthcare consultant, I was always surprised by the limited understanding of how patients are treated in daily practice. Basic insights, such as treatment allocation, were surprisingly difficult to obtain.
Ideally, decisions should be based on factual evidence of how treatments affect the actual patient population, rather than relying on gut feelings or anecdotal experiences. However, limited access to real-world data makes it challenging to determine which treatments are most effective.
Today, achieving cost-effectiveness
in healthcare is crucial.
What is the solution to real-world data access?
A powerful first step is helping care providers easily collect and securely share their real-world data. This enables the transformation of real-world data into real-world evidence and supports clinicians in making evidence-based decisions.
LOGEX has achieved this by launching its Actionable Real-World Evidence Network (ARWEN), which has attracted hospitals from all over Europe, including the UK. Together, they enhance our understanding of healthcare delivery and patient-specific outcomes, empowering stakeholders to make meaningful improvements.
Decisions you can stand by. Impact you can measure.
How can real-world data add value, aside from improving care?
Today, achieving cost-effectiveness in healthcare is crucial. The NHS operates in silos, where specific data is inaccessible, making it nearly impossible to gain valuable insights into patient-specific costs and expenditures.
Without clear visibility into the actual costs of patient pathways, it becomes challenging to identify unusual spending patterns. This is why we combine ARWEN’s real-world evidence with LOGEX benchmarking, enabling us to pinpoint areas for cost optimisation without having to compromise patient and clinical outcomes.
We now have countless examples of how this delivers immediate and actionable benefits. The idea that unlocking the value of data is just a theoretical exercise, or wishful thinking for a hospital, is no longer true.
