The Extracorporeal Life Support Organization Registry: update and perspectives

From the birth of the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO) Registry in 1989, collecting the most relevant information about extracorporeal life support (ECLS) for refractory cardiac or respiratory compromise, was created in order to provide useful information and benchmark for ECLS users. Throughout the years, the Registry has continuously developed, achieving in 2018 more than 100,000 patients included with almost 500 ELSO centers around the world. Based on the relevance and impact of database analysis, and due to the growing need for more advanced and high-quality clinical investigations, the ELSO Registry is under substantial re-engineering which will allow and provide the ELSO members and the scientific community an enhanced scientific tool to elucidate various aspects of the ECLS settings, including trends and disease-specific information, to perform benchmarking about our own results and outcomes as compared to regional or worldwide results, and to provide an invaluable source of data for clinical investigations.