AHRQ Releases Guidance for Registries
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released a guidebook May 16th to help facilitate utilization of patient registries for outcomes assessment of treatment, Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User’s Guide.
Registries provide clinicians and scientists a tool to evaluate groups of patients. Over the long term, such tools have been useful in identifying trends and long-term outcomes associated with treatment approaches.
The growing number of registries in a variety of healthcare settings, in part a function of the electronic medical record, offer the opportunity to answer a variety of research questions. The guide provides advice on leveraging databases and ensuring optimal design. Other subjects included are means to encourage participation in data registries and tools to detect adverse outcomes.
The project was a joint effort between AHRQ and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which both contributed funding for the project. At AHRQ, the guide came out of the Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions about Effectiveness (DEcIDE) effort which is a part of the Effective Health Care (EHC) Program.
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May 18, 2007 Related topics: Quality, Safety, Errors