A European approach towards resource management and strategic planning was implemented in the HOSCOM project of AIM by defining information standards needed across countries, as well as a methodology to measure resources and costs at institutional and inter-institutional levels.

A European Health Data Base (EHDB) was set up in order to test data availability and comparability as well as to validate models through macro-comparisons using case-mix (DRG's, refined grouping, disease staging) and micro-comparisons based on three diseases (cardiac valve replacement, diabetes mellitus and hip fracture). Presently this EHDB contains 274,164 medical record summaries sampled from 7 countries. It allowed to build prototypes (using Clipper, Prolog and SQL) in order to compare uniform aggregates for different countries, with standard software tools for statistical comparisons. It showed the present feasibility to use case-mix based on the European Minimum Basic Data Set (MBDS) and the difficulty to obtain uniform data on resources and costs other than length of stay across countries. Medical data confidentiality was assured but not yet population-based representativity. A number of problems have been identified, given the current state of development of the EHDB, which can be solved by international research and development projects in the near future.