Miller Family Heart & Vascular Institute Registries
Registries in cardiovascular medicine, thoracic and cardiovascular surgery, and vascular surgery date to the early 1970s, long before national societies, watch-dog groups, insurers, and state and federal government began requiring data related to both process of care and outcomes. The first of these was the Cardiovascular Information Registry formed jointly by the Robert and Suzanne Tomsich Department of Cardiovascular Medicine and the departments of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. Subsequently registries were established in all interventional settings.
Because clinical medical documentation is often in narrative form, technicians and nurses have maintained these registries by translating the medical record into discrete data elements. These data are used for external reporting to quality monitoring groups, insurers, and state and federal agencies. They are used internally for quality monitoring and improvement. They also form the bases for generating new knowledge from a large number of studies of clinical cohorts.
Currently, the many disparate registries that have been developed within the Miller Family Heart & Vascular Institute are being integrated into a single population-centric database in modern semantic form that permits unlimited future extensibility to embrace new techniques and new types of data, but also permits near-natural-language query of the database by investigators in a fashion similar to that proposed for the Semantic Web (of which Cleveland Clinic is a member).