Clinical quality registries: Establishing the socio-technical infrastructure for learning health systems

Clinical quality registries (CQR) systematically monitor and provide feedback on the appropriateness and effectiveness of health care within specific clinical domains, collecting data about medical care processes and outcomes, and providing benchmarked performance reports to health care providers for the purpose of driving improvements in safety and quality.

The successful development of a learning infrastructure requires the alignment of people, technologies, policies, and processes, brought together by shared needs and a culture of continuous quality improvement. The creation and description of such infrastructure is likely to successfully support the delivery of services critical to continuous quality improvement initiatives.

We aimed to describe the construction and impacts of healthcare improvement infrastructure within CQRs.

Socio-technical infrastructure comprises participants that contribute to the design, evaluation, reporting and dissemination of quality improvement activities: employing effective and timely data acquisition, describing healthcare processes and outcomes; supported by directed policy process and supportive organisations. Review of CQR function identifies positive impacts on healthcare utilisation, improved clinical outcomes and significant improvement in survival supported by cost effective investment.

Quality improvement frameworks and strategies have been developed to drive CQRs towards international best practice in learning health system structure for data collection and reporting; delivering efficiency and interoperability in data collection and exchange; promoting standardised approaches to CQR design.

Clinical quality registries have demonstrated significant national impacts in quality improvement in high burden disease domains. These registries rely on the construction and resourcing of socio-technical infrastructures that support quality improvement.