Disease Registries Help Doctors Share Information
Disease registries enable doctors and hospitals to learn about and share the latest information on best clinical practices for disease and conditions. According to a post on the Health Affairs blog, other countries have adopted disease registries faster than the United States:
For example, Sweden began a registry for hip replacement surgery in 1979. Since then, Sweden has reduced its revision burden (the number of surgeries that have to be repeated as a share of total hip replacements in a given year) to 10 percent—saving some $14 million per year. The authors estimate that if the United States had in place a similar registry for hip-replacement surgery, it would avoid some $2 billion of an expected $24 billion in total costs for these surgeries in 2015.
I am not sure how disease registries work.
After two click throughs one gets to the article. It calls for public seed money and funding for new registeries. This is never a good sign.
The major improvement in health outcomes for the Swedish acute myocardical infarction registry is that “Swedish hospitals greatly improved their adherence to nine interventions recommended by the Eruopean Society of Cardiology.”
Mortality fell between 1998 and 2009 and this is attributed to the registry. But mortality fell in the US between 1996 and 2006, too. It also fell in the UK, in France, and, well, in a lot of places because medical care got better.
How much of the decline in Sweden was due to a registry? Unknown.
Also, as of 2010 there were year long waits for hip replacements in Sweden [http://www.sahlgrenska.gu.se/english/news_and_events/news/News_Detail/expensive-wait-for-hip-replacements.cid968599]. How does one know whether the lower level of reoperations is due to difficult cases becoming too sick to withstand surgery, or, perhaps, having a recovery that is so poor that a second attempt is denied?