Registers improve the quality of health services and research
[PRESS INVITATION 04/12/2014] A conference on the health services' quality registers at Karolinska Institutet captures the perspectives of different users and different countries on these registers, as well as how they can be used and developed. For the first time, there is now compiled information available on the contents of different Swedish registers, something that will be presented in more detail at the conference.
The function of a quality register is to collect data on different treatments, and thus raise the quality of care provided. But there is a growing interest in also using these quality registers for research purposes. At the conference, different strategies will be discussed for how to adapt the registers currently available in Sweden for broader use. A large number of researchers from the USA, UK, Norway and Finland, among other countries, will also participate in the conference with the hope of also finding ways to increase international collaboration. Such collaboration could, for example, make it possible to compare treatment results between countries. Presently this can pose a challenge as the various registers are designed differently.
Charlotta Levay, Lund University and Harvard University, will speak about political initiatives that can promote and support quality registers. Stefan James, Uppsala University, is one of the researchers behind a noted clinical study that experimented with randomly selecting patients for various treatments with the help of quality registers. He will speak in more detail about how these registers can be used to make clinical research more effective.
Within the Swedish health services there are currently quality registers for most therapeutic fields. However, they are not as common within primary care. One of the problems with the quality registers is that they entail twice the work, as patient data must be entered into the records as well as the registers. Text mining, as in drawing data from the patient records, could be an alternative to separate quality registers. Jyoti Pathak, Mayo Clinic, USA, is an expert on how to process large quantities of text from records in order to compile the information as statistical data. He will speak more on this subject during the conference.
"Another option would of course be to standardise Swedish patient records so that the data can be directly entered into a quality register without having to process it twice,” says Jonas F Ludvigsson, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet and one of the conference organisers.
In a project run jointly by the National Board of Health and Welfare, the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions and Karolinska Institutet, he has compiled a list of all Swedish quality registers and their contents. His work was recently published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, and facilitates research to a significant degree. Anyone who would like to know which quality registers contain data concerning patient haemoglobin levels, body weight, kidney function, quality of life or any other parameter can look it up in this enormous publication. A presentation on the project will be given at the conference.
Reporters are welcome to have interviews with the scientists
Conference: Quality Registers (QRs)
Time: 8–9 December 2014
Place: Norra Latin, Drottninggatan 71B, Stockholm
If you have any questions, please contact:
Professor Jonas F Ludvigsson
Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics
+46 (0)73-029 63 18
Jonas.Ludvigsson@ki.se
Press Officer Sabina Bossi
+46 (0)8-524 860 66, +46 (0)70-614 60 66
sabina.bossi@ki.se
Karolinska Institutet is one of the world’s leading medical universities. It accounts for over 40 per cent of the medical academic research conducted in Sweden and offers the country’s broadest range of education in medicine and health sciences. Since 1901 the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has selected the Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine.
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