The following are 10 points to remember about the future of registries and the performance measurement enterprise:

1. There has been an increasing emphasis on measuring and improving the quality and efficiency of medical care, and the proliferation of clinical registries designed to understand care and outcomes in “real-world” medical settings.
2. A clinical registry is an observational database focused on a clinical condition, procedure, therapy, or population.
3. Clinical registries are optimal tools for measuring the outcomes of care processes, although special effort may be necessary to ascertain nonfatal outcomes.
4. The future of registries and performance measurement are interlinked closely.
5. In order to develop optimal performance measures based on clinical registry data, professional societies and other organizations will first have to overcome the barriers to implementing and maintaining their own clinical data registries.
6. The interrelationship between clinical registries and performance measures will become even more important as risk-adjusted outcome data are used for high-stake applications such as public report cards, preferred provider networks, and reimbursement.
7. The value of clinical registries, whose data have typically been limited to short-term outcomes, will be enhanced in the future through linkages with other data sources, such as claims data, which will provide information on long-term outcomes, resource use, re-hospitalizations, and re-interventions.
8. By measuring and reporting registry performance to clinicians, individual sites, and integrated health care networks, as well as publicly reporting when appropriate, registries will be able to influence care profoundly.
9. As clinical registries cover progressively more of the healthcare landscape and are supplemented by additional data from electronic health records, claims databases, and other data sources, it will bring insights into real-world practice that have not yet been possible, ultimately improving healthcare delivery and patient outcomes.
10. Through advocacy for wider adoption of performance measures, developers can simultaneously promote both use of their performance measures and the registries that report those measures, furthering the goals of patient-centered care.

Keywords: Data Collection, Electronic Health Records, Hospitalization, Patient-Centered Care, Registries, Secondary Prevention, Quality Assurance, Health Care, Task Performance and Analysis

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