Vista EHR Clinical Case Registries

The Clinical Case Registries (CCR) application contains demographic and clinical data on VHA patients with certain clinical conditions. CCR is designed to allow multiple registries to be supported to track a variety of clinical conditions or disease states.

CCR uses pre-defined selection rules to identify patients with registry-specific conditions, such as a disease-related ICD-9 code or a positive result on an antibody test, and then adds these patients to the appropriate registry in a pending state. Pending patients are reviewed by the local registry coordinator and if the data confirms the diagnosis, the local registry coordinator confirms the patient in the registry.

CCR accesses VistA files that contain information regarding additional diagnoses, prescriptions, surgical procedures, laboratory tests, radiology exams, patient demographics, hospital admissions, and clinical visits. This access allows identified clinical staff to take advantage of the wealth of data supported through VistA when managing specific patient populations.

Data from the registries is used for both clinical and administrative reporting on both a local and national level. Each facility can produce local reports containing information related to patients treated in their system. Reports from the national database are used to monitor clinical and administrative trends, including issues related to patient safety, quality of care, and disease evolution across the national population of VHA patients.

CCR provides these key features:

·         Automates the development of a local list of patients with a specific condition.

·         Automatically transmits patient data from the local registry to a national database.

·         Provides robust reporting functions.

·         Facilitates the tracking of patient outcomes relative to treatment.

·         Identifies and tracks important trends in treatment response, adverse events, and time on therapy.

·         Monitors quality of care using both process and patient outcome measures.

Two of the larger Clinical Case Registries (CCR) are:  HepC, which tracks patients with Hepatitis C; and HIV, which tracks patients who have positive HIV titers.