The overarching objective of our collaborative is to compare treatment approaches and outcomes for older adults from developed countries with advanced health care systems. The focus of our work is on conditions that universally present to a hospital and result in hospital admission, regardless of country. Conditions are selected because of their clinical and economic importance, the availability of well-established algorithms for identifying each condition in administrative data, and their combination of acute and sub-acute presentation that typically requires hospitalization, thus allowing for identification of similar cohorts of patients across countries.

In order to carry out this research, we have assembled an international team of experienced investigators with access to population-representative data in their local jurisdictions. We will leverage this experience to perform detailed clinical analyses that will allow for cross national learning that will inform future policies in multiple countries. The IHSRC was launched in 2018 with 5 OECD countries (US, Canada (two provinces), Netherlands, Israel, and England). These countries were then joined by Taiwan and Denmark, and, more recently, expanded to include South Korea, Switzerland, and Australia (the state of NSW).