Renal registries in the era of guidelines, standards and quality improvement. One view from the UK Renal Registry experience

Abstract

Over the past decade the UK Renal Registry has rehearsed the collection, analysis and presentation of a range of laboratory, as well as demographic, data from an increasing number of renal units. This has been accomplished by fully electronic means. The normalisation of disparate laboratory results to allow comparative audit remains a problem. The exercise has allowed a largely passive and intuitive exploration of the role that such data aggregation can play in a modern clinical context that is influenced by the Evidence Based Medicine movement and the development of Clinical Practice Guidelines, Standards and Clinical Performance Measures. To extend the data collection to clinical variables from these unselected patient groups, in order to explain as well as to describe clinical activity, is attractive but appears yet more challenging. These experiences can be used perhaps by the nephrological community to inform the further development of similar proposals in Europe, especially the concepts and structures required to link such information to the prospect of real clinical benefit.