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Implementation of a New UPMC Gamma Knife Radiosurgery Quality Assurance Registry
Ajay Niranjan1, Denise Layne, Mark Briercheck
1Department of Neurological Surgery, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Object:
In this report, we discuss the development of a new, comprehensive, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant electronic quality assurance (QA) registry for Gamma Knife (GK) radiosurgery patients. This registry can be used to query outcomes, link with current hospital electronic medical records, and share data with future corporate or national professional society registries under development.
Methods:
A clinical task force comprising physicians and regulatory, legal, and information technology (IT) experts was created to define the nomenclature, regulatory requirements, hosting site, and required capabilities of the proposed system. A team of physicians and IT experts defined the clinical parameters and designed the query functions for the registry.
Results:
The UPMC GK Registry was established as a QA registry exempt from Institutional Review Board oversight. In order to facilitate subsequent query functions (analytics), data entry was created for 3 main categories: brain tumors, vascular malformations, and functional disorders. A Microsoft SQL-based database infrastructure was employed.
Conclusions:
We developed a new UPMC GK QA registry and successfully migrated our previous data on 13,000 patients into the registry. This simplified and user-friendly registry offers clinicians the opportunity to participate in national registries and to contribute to multicenter evidence-based outcome analyses.
