Clinical Database Registries
Without some form of clinical audit, it is difficult to know if healthcare is being delivered efficiently or effectively and even more difficult to demonstrate to others.
The purpose of clinical database registries is to improve the safety and/or quality of healthcare provided to patients by collecting key clinical information from individual healthcare encounters. This enables risk-adjusted outcomes to be used in evidencebased quality improvement. Cabrini leads the development and application of a number of high quality clinical database registries.
Cabrini Monash Colorectal Neoplasia Database Bowel cancer is a major cause of illness, disability and death worldwide. Complete and accurate data remain the key requirements to describe processes and outcomes of care for all patients with bowel cancer. Registries play a critical role in cancer surveillance allowing us to evaluate survival, new cases and deaths. The primary purpose of this surgical audit is to monitor outcomes and report on quality of care and report this back to the treating clinicians. Clinicians, researchers and others use audit data to answer questions like, “What is the surgical complication rate after treatment for bowel cancer?”, “Should malignant polyps be treated differently depending on their location?” and “What are the predictive factors of a complete pathological response in patients with locally advanced rectal cancer?” Bowel cancer is the third most common type of newly diagnosed cancer in Australia and is the second biggest cancer killer. The Colorectal Database Registry, conceived and entirely funded by the Cabrini Monash Department of Surgery in 2007, implemented in 2010, is now a well-established registry capturing data on patients with either bowel cancer or benign bowel neoplasia surgically treated at Cabrini Health and other Monash affiliated hospitals, including The Alfred, Peninsula Health and Monash Medical Centre, Dandenong. In 2013, the Colorectal Surgical Society of Australia and New Zealand (CSSANZ) developed the Bi-National Colorectal Cancer Audit (BCCA), a minimally scaled duplicate version, with participation from over 97 sites across Australia and New Zealand contributing data from over 38,000 patients. The registry allows surgeons to benchmark their performance amongst their peers, ensuring a commitment to the highest standards of patient care. The role of the database manager is to also inform patients of the leading-edge research we are conducting in collaboration with laboratories at Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology. Patients willing to provide consent allow us to collect valuable clinical samples such as tumour and
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