To address the crucial issue of data quality another document was made outlining the standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the capture of data at renal centres which will be complemented by SOPs for processing
of data transferred to renal registries.
The pilot projects in the different countries will now need to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. We expect that the tools and applications emerging from this will ease future data processing and transfer. The pilot work needs subcontracting and has been put out to tender.
Very recently we started a number of other projects including one to further increase the quality of data collected. The first meeting on the issue took place last February in the office of the UK Renal Registry in Bristol where our colleagues from the French Agence de la Biomédecine put forward a research proposal for the comparison of the quality of data collected in different ways. The second project deals with the development of effective techniques for reporting clinical performance indicators. This project will be led by the University of Cologne based QiN project. Finally, there will be a study on existing and potential quality improvement programmes using clinical performance indicators in nephrology. We were satisfied that in the past year the first NephroQUEST interim report was accepted by the Executive Agency for Health and Consumers (EAHC). Nevertheless, this progress report shows that in the remaining project period there is still quite some work to be done.

Kitty Jager, NephroQUEST Project Manager, Ronald Cornet, NephroQUEST IT Manager and Carmine Zoccali, ERA-EDTA Registry Chairman