A professional body has joined up with a healthcare IT company to launch the International Atrial Fibrillation Registry (IAFR), designed to garner data on patient outcomes following surgery for the cardiac arrhythmia condition.
The European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS) and Dendrite Clinical Systems aim with the IAFR to collect enough data to produce a report on the outcomes of atrial fibrillation surgery, to be published by Dendrite.
Data will be collected at the individual patient level, and will then be used to track individuals and groups of patients, with the reports being made freely available to all contributors.
“The goal is to collect data from across Europe to enable us to make better informed judgements on the appropriate surgical treatment approaches for the management of atrial fibrillation,” said Steven Hunter, Registry Chairman, Cardiothoracic Division, The James Cook University Hospital, Middlesbrough, UK.
“The best way to assess whether something is effective would be a randomised controlled trial. However, with so many different devices treating different lesions and having to standardise the data across so many countries, with follow up out to five years, to run such a trial would be near impossible.
“Whereas a registry with a database of thousands of patients, which can show how effective the procedures and devices are would have a lot more weight scientifically.”
Registrants will be able to enter data online, and it will remain the property of the contributing surgeon and EACTS.
