Clinical Registry
A clinical registry is a systematic collection of standardized health data about patients sharing a common condition, exposure, or procedure, used for quality benchmarking, outcomes research, and regulatory reporting by specialty societies and CMS.
What is a Clinical Registry?
Clinical registries collect curated, validated clinical data from multiple participating sites and aggregate it for cross-site benchmarking and outcomes research. Major examples include the STS National Database (cardiac surgery risk-adjusted outcomes, used as a MIPS QCDR), the ACC National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR, covering cath lab procedures, chest pain center certification, and atrial fibrillation), the American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR, tracking total hip and knee arthroplasty outcomes), and NCI's SEER database (population-level cancer outcomes). Registry data differs fundamentally from single-institution EHR data: registries provide validated, comparably coded data from hundreds of sites, enabling risk-adjusted benchmarking that is not possible with local data alone. Data abstraction for registries has historically been manual — trained chart abstractors enter structured data into registry forms — though EHR-to-registry automated feeds are increasingly available. Many specialty societies operate their registry as a CMS-approved Qualified Clinical Data Registry (QCDR), allowing participating clinicians to report specialty-specific MIPS quality measures rather than generic measures that may not reflect their clinical practice.
Why It Matters for Healthcare Analytics
Registry participation provides two simultaneous benefits: MIPS compliance via QCDR reporting, and multi-site benchmarking data that reveals how a practice's outcomes compare to peers nationally. Without registry benchmarking, quality improvement lacks an external reference point — a surgeon's 30-day complication rate is meaningless without knowing the national distribution for similar patient risk profiles.
How Vizier Tracks Clinical Registry Data
Upload your registry export or EHR data alongside registry benchmarks, then ask "How do our risk-adjusted outcomes compare to the national registry average for this procedure?" — Vizier presents your performance against national registry distributions and identifies MIPS QCDR measure completion gaps.