Andrea Tilstra, Arun Frey, and Mark Verhagen are part of a winning consortium to study excess mortality using registry data, during the peak of COVID-19 in The Netherlands.
The awarded project, ‘Providing context to excess mortality through changes in healthcare use during the COVID-19 pandemic’, is part of the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development’s (ZonMw’s) research into reasons and causes of excess mortality in the Netherlands during COVID-19 between 2020-2021.
Together with the Amsterdam Health and Technology Institute (AHTI), the Centre will use individual-level health insurance data and administrative records to compare healthcare use in the years before COVID-19 with the year 2020.
This project will lead to a better understanding of how the COVID-19 pandemic shocked healthcare utilisation. The study also explores how these shocks to utilisation have differed across demographic and social groups in the population.
Mark Verhagen, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre, adds, ‘We are delighted to be partnering with AHTI and utilising their extensive environment which will allow us to link health related data with demographic data to study health patterns beyond COVID-19’s direct effect.’
In doing so, the researchers will provide a vital understanding into the long-term health impact of the pandemic, as well as how the burden is distributed across social and demographic groups.
These insights will be crucial in ensuring that the long-term repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic are understood, and allow for a more targeted response to catch up on missed care.
More information about the project can be found here.
