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What are the key features that my disease registry should have to support QI?

Disease registries have largely been used for retrospective reporting and, in most cases, not utilized by providers at the point of care. However, these tools are increasingly being refined to support greater integration at the point of care. Health centers and networks for a number of years have been making use of disease registries to support various QI initiatives and for reporting on HRSA quality measures. The capability of registries to perform cross-patient analyses and generate reports can be invaluable to QI. These tools have been specifically designed for panel management and support easy and efficient abstraction of quality data.

Disease registries are capable of tracking individual patients as well as panels or populations of patients with certain conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and asthma. They are therefore a prime tool for care management and for promoting preventive care. They can be applied towards identifying patients in need of specific medical tests and interventions and can alert physicians of problem areas. Specific functions supported by disease registries include identifying and managing panels of patients, using filters to identify patients most in need of intervention, developing clinician reports, managing patient follow up, clinical decision support, integration with other systems including laboratory systems and EHRs and enhanced reporting capability. Disease registries can also be used to generate care-planning tools for individual patients. All these features foster improved care coordination, contribute to the provision of more timely and personalized care and can lead to improvements in the health outcomes of patients.

Related Resources:

Patient Registries: A Key Step to Quality Improvement - American College of Physicians
Using Computerized Registries in Chronic Disease Care - California Health Care Foundation