NephroQUEST

It is for me a great pleasure seeing the QUEST initiative making important steps forward in fulfilling its mission statement, i.e. promoting quality studies and continuous quality improvement programs (cQIPs) in Europe. Since 2005, the time we started this initiative, the demand for better quality in clinical care by patients and health financing organizations has increased considerably which now makes fulfilling QUEST goals even more compelling. Establishing electronic procedures for data capturing in existing European filing systems is a critical step for the success of NephroQUEST. Data capturing will facilitate enormously data collection by the registries. In this respect the pilot projects that will be started in the next few months in various countries will serve to identify the difficulties and the barriers ahead. Thus, after a long preparatory phase, NephroQUEST is entering into a hot, hands-on, phase.
Establishing consensus on the most suitable clinical indicators to adopt in cQIPs is an important achievement and now the adaptation of these indicators for use in children is a good opportunity for bridging adult and paediatric nephrology and adult and paediatric renal registries. In this respect the determination by the ERA-EDTA and ESPN in strengthening the collaboration between these renal registries is of foremost importance for the scientific growth of the same registries. This move will indeed make possible new studies and new analyses across all age groups.
I believe that in the medium term, a 5 years time-frame, we will witness the products of NephroQUEST becoming a fundamental support for decision-making for clinical nephrologists, clinical investigators, patients and health organizations alike. Ongoing efforts by the regional and national registries that entered QUEST and by the ERA-EDTA Registry will produce the rewarding results we all expect.

One of the aims of NephroQUEST is to assist new and existing renal registries to further develop towards high-quality renal registries. One of the seven registries participating in this part of the project is the Romanian Renal Registry (RRR). The RRR was founded already in 1994 as a structure of the Ministry of Health, administered by “Dr Carol Davila” Teaching Hospital of Nephrology (SCD) and guided by a National Committee, including members from the Ministry of Health, the Insurance House, the Romanian Society of Nephrology, and an SCD representative. Its initial aim was to collect individual data on RRT patients to allow a well-balanced development of health care facilities and to assess the need for resources. The data are monthly collected with web-based data entry at each centre and are used for double-checking with the National Insurance House. As the reimbursement to the centres is made according to the completeness of reported data, the RRR is covering 100% of the country both in terms of centres and of patient population (85 centres by the end of 2008).

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