Quality assurance

Quality assurance in the field of healthcare is growing in importance. The reasons for this include the increasing complexity of modern diagnostics and treatment, the international recognition and prevalence of evidence-based treatment guidelines and the rising interest of patients, physicians and insurance companies in the transparency of services and healthcare results.

Efficient clinical registers represent a quality assurance instrument. They serve to implement and evaluate guidelines and their effectiveness in regional, national or multinational patient populations, to record side effects in large patient groups outside of clinical studies and pharmacoeconomic analyses under real-life conditions.

Data security

In addition, data security is one of the key issues with registry projects. Participating physicians are identified by means of a username and password – there is also the option to use additional codes in a similar way to online banking. All data are stored on fail-safe servers in the computer centers of Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG (OeKB), which are protected against unauthorized accessed by state-of-the-art security systems. High availability (24/7) and regular back-ups are a matter of course for us. An additional benefit: OeKB is an independent partner and is committed to the highest standards of quality and security in its position as Austria’s number one financial and information services provider for exports and capital markets.

Both the Java application and the Oracle database offer high standards of security without compromising on flexibility and availability. Patient data are pseudonymized and stored in the online registry. When being exported, data is encrypted further and made available in an anonymized but statistically useful format.

Clinical online registries almost always lead to the introduction and monitoring of quality standards due to the required standardization of data collection. Furthermore, data from clinical registries show the extent to which evidence-based guidelines can be implemented in practice and if treatment results or toxicities differ noticeably from those observed in studies.

All of these quality and security aspects can create favorable conditions for a positive ethics vote. Our registries have been assessed by the respective ethics commissions and received positive results in every case.