Samsung Seoul Hospital's Cancer Center announced Monday that it has become the first institution in South Korea to obtain certification from the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM).
ICHOM is a nonprofit organization that sets international standards for realizing Value-Based Healthcare. It defines clinical outcomes and quality-of-life outcomes that matter to patients and develops and distributes them as standardized "Standard Sets." The initiative aims to help shift healthcare systems from a treatment-process focus to a patient-outcome focus. To date, 48 sets have been developed and are used by more than 500 institutions across over 60 countries.
Samsung Seoul Hospital received ICHOM Stage 1 certification in the breast cancer field. ICHOM certification is divided into three stages. Stage 1 evaluates whether the standard sets proposed by ICHOM — Clinician Reported Outcomes (CRO) and Patient-Reported Outcomes (PRO) — are properly measured and managed.
Since 2018, Samsung Seoul Hospital has operated a system in which breast cancer patients assess their own quality of life at every outpatient visit starting from the time of surgery. Based on these assessments, patients and their medical teams jointly determine post-surgical treatment plans. ICHOM noted that the hospital's PRO response rate exceeded 80%, a very high level. The organization also credited the hospital's patient-centered, value-based approach for the five-year relative survival rate of 97.6% among breast cancer patients treated at the institution.
Samsung Seoul Hospital plans to expand ICHOM-related certification to cancer types beyond breast cancer. In 2024, the hospital partnered with Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance to establish the "Cancer Patient Quality of Life Research Institute," focusing on research and support programs to improve quality of life across the entire lifespan of cancer patients. More recently, the hospital signed a memorandum of understanding with the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) as an official partner overseeing standardization and quality control of Korean-language PRO tool translations.
"With this certification, we will establish ourselves as a leading institution in patient-centered, value-based healthcare," said Kim Hee-cheol, director of the Cancer Center and professor of colorectal surgery.