EuCliD® – A Medical Registry

Abstract

Summary Objectives: The European Clinical Database EuCliD® * has been developed as a tool for supervising selected quality indicators of about 200 European dialysis centers. Major efforts had to be made to comply with local and European laws regarding data security. Method: EuCliD® is a Lotus Notes® based flat-file database currently containing medical data of more than 14,000 dialysis patients from 10 European countries. Another 15,000 patients from 150 centers in 4 South-American countries will be added soon. Data are entered either manually or by means of interfaces to existing local data managing systems. This information is transferred to a central Lotus Notes Server. Data evaluation was performed with statistical tools like SPSS. Results: EuCliD® is used as a part of the CQI (Continuous Quality Improvement) management system of Fresenius Medical Care (FMC) dialysis units. Each participating dialysis center receives (currently every half year) benchmarking reports at a regular interval. The benchmark for all quality parameters is the weighted mean of the corresponding data of all centers. Conclusions: An obvious impact of data sampling and data evaluation on the quality of the treatments could be observed within the first one and a half years of working with EuCliD®. This also concerns important outcome predictors like Kt/V and hemoglobin concentration as the outcome itself expressed in hospitalization days and survival rates. With the help of EuCliD® the user is able to sample clinical data, identify problems, search for solutions with the aim of improving the dialysis treatment quality and guarantee a high-class treatment quality for all patients.