Question

How are registries different from other surveillance information systems? Public Health Informatics (Chapter 14 – Q2)

Answer 1

Ans) Registries can provide detailed clinical, demographic, and treatment-specific information on disease or procedure-specific populations or insured populations for monitoring the quality and quantity of care provided. But many registries focus on specific clinical populations, and this may result in incomplete information if the patient or beneficiary accesses care outside of the healthcare system. Hospital-based registries also include detailed information about a hospitalization but often no follow-up data. Finally, the decision to include a patient in a registry can be subjective as this decision is typically made by a clinician.

- Prospective cohort studies can provide critical information for surveillance through the collection of incidence rates of temporal events (including exposures) and of clinical and patient-reported outcomes. However, prevalence information cannot be measured beyond baseline.

- Moreover, because longitudinal follow-up (a major strength of cohort studies) is resource intensive, the number of subjects participating will be limited, preventing the study of rare events or the study of smaller subgroups such as counties.

- Critical surveillance indicators are also available in health services research data. These include hospitalization and readmission rates at the national, state, and local levels. Healthcare surveys have the ability to provide prevalence rates for cardiovascular and chronic lung disease risk factors and some outcomes. While there is as yet no universally accepted interoperable data platform for electronic medical health record data, incidence and prevalence information would be available. However, like registry data, health services data exclude information extraneous to the healthcare delivery system.