While there has been a rapid increase in the number of clinical registries over the past decade, there are still broad clinical areas and specific procedures that would benefit from the creation of a dedicated registry, according to a “Statement on the Future of Registries and the Performance Measurement Enterprise,” released Oct. 2 by the ACC, the American Heart Association and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, and simultaneously published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The statement examines the current state of clinical registries while acknowledging their future growth potential. The authors explain that feedback from clinical registries provides information on a health care professional’s own outcomes, which are benchmarked against regional, national or even international data, and timely reports about processes and outcomes of care.

Further, they note that registries will increasingly provide a platform for embedding pragmatic randomized clinical trials to answer common real-world questions, and will continue to provide valuable data of medical devices post approval to assess their safety and efficacy in clinical practice.

“Registries are fundamental to health care quality and improvement,” says Deepak L. Bhatt, MD, MPH, FACC, chair of the writing committee. “Registries can support the development, implementation, and evaluation of performance measures as tools for improving patient care and communicating meaningful information to patients regarding quality. The future will likely involve some degree of integration of electronic health records and administrative data sources with registry data,” he adds.

Keywords: American Heart Association, Registries, Societies, Surgeons

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