Fundamentals of Implementing a National Clinical Registries Program

A National registry program is a resource intensive initiative involving multiple stakeholders, multi-institutional/multi-role/multi-users collaborative effort, where various aspects starting from work culture, research culture, registry conceptualization, resource availability, data format, data storage/retrieval techniques, data sharing protocols, data/dataset standards, data quality etc. vary drastically between different institutions. The biggest challenge for a national program will be to map these aspects under a common umbrella to establish standards for operations/execution, policies and procedures, which means aligning the registry operations with the operative process of each institution at first, due to this only a handful initiatives are implemented with limited success, hence it is advisable to study such implementations in great details as a guideline to build a solid foundation for future national initiatives[1][2]. The idea goes around building a solid database for holding all clinical registries under a single repository, along with streamlining and generalizing the policies and procedures for any disease or medical device registry, in order to save infrastructure spending, streamlining, saving on management and operational costs and overheads.