April Journal Club

Liselotte Fierens will present on the development of a Core Outcome Set (COS) for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). As part of the Health Outcomes Observatory (H2O) IMI-funded project, and building on existing knowledge, the IBD COS was defined through an international modified Delphi method involving 136 stakeholders from 20 countries, including patients (advocates), health care professionals and researchers, industry representatives and regulators. The set includes case-mix variables, biomarkers, and patient-reported outcome and experience measures. Increasing uptake of PROMs usage empowers patients to better manage their care, while standardisation of health outcome measurements supports delivery of care and enables data-driven learning systems and secondary data use for research. The COS has already been implemented in clinical practice at multiple partner sites in the H2O project, with hundreds of patients enrolled and first results presented internationally at the ECCO 2025 Conference.

Liselotte Fierens

In 2019, Liselotte graduated with a degree in Biomedical Sciences from the Catholic University of Leuven, specializing in Management and Communication. Later that year, she deepened her focus on the field of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), the subject of her master’s thesis, by starting a PhD with the Leuven IBD research group. After successfully defending her PhD on improving the quality of care for patients with IBD in March 2024, Liselotte continued her work as a postdoctoral researcher within the same group. Currently, she is spending five months at the Health Economics Research Centre at the University of Oxford, where she is expanding her knowledge and expertise in health economics to support future research projects.