Lessons from Sharing Hospital MBDS in the CAMISE project: need for further standardization.

Hospital MBDS is a powerful tool for improving the knowledge on hospital performance. Within CAMISE, a BIOMED research, a databank of about 4,000,000 discharges from 420 hospitals in 12 countries has been collected, and a lot of effort has been devoted to make them comparable and therefore useful for research purposes. Results from CAMISE shows important opportunities from cooperation of European level. It points out the need for making them available to researchers under the suitable conditions of confidentiality, security and control.