The Work package 8 of the European project Bridge Health, focused on the realization of a platform for population based registries, aimed to gather, harmonise and disseminate procedures and best practices in population-based registries for the provision of community health indicators of occurrence, quality of care and outcomes of chronic diseases in Europe.

 

The leadership of WP 8 (Platform for population based registries) was assigned to Istituto Superiore di Sanità.

 

The strategic objective was to improve and guarantee the quality of data collected by population-based registries of chronic diseases, facilitate their implementation, sustainability and maintenance, including the provision of specialized software for the statistical analysis, data exchange, and automated calculation of indicators, both locally and at EU level. The compliance of process with strict privacy and data protection requirements were systematically assessed.

 

Taking advantage of existing experience from EUROCISS (European Cardiovascular Indicators Surveillance Set) and EUBIROD (EUropean Best Information through Regional Outcomes in Diabetes), two tasks contributed in the realization of the work: task 1, assigned to Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Iss) focusing on chronic disease occurrence and task 2 focusing on quality of health care (Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata and University of Surrey).

 

Task 1 finalized activities – (Istituto Superiore di Sanità)

• Consolidation of the collaborative network of fieldwork experts involved in surveillance of chronic diseases and interested in building a platform for population based registries. For more information read the Technical report “Consolidation of the Network of field work experts” of the WP8, Task 1 (pdf 1 Mb).
• Manual of operations with stepwise procedures for population based registries implementation, sharing sources of information and including population size, sources of information, standardized diagnostic criteria, internal and external validation, elaboration of disease occurrence indicators. For more information read the Manual of operations “Platform for population based registries” of the WP8, Task 1 (pdf 1,6 Mb).
• Guidelines for training personnel involved in the implementation of population based registers of chronic diseases at local level including definitions, procedures for record linkage, validation, assessment of disease. For more information consult:
  • the page dedicated to the Training of personnel (including the slide presentations for training personnel involved in Population-based registries implementation).
  • the Report “Guidelines for training personnel involved in population based registries”, of the WP8, Task 1 (pdf 872 kb).

Also were explored synergies with other groups involved in population health information/health examination (EHIS/EHES) and in morbidity/mortality surveillance (EUROSTAT) (for more information consult the pages dedicated to the Expert meetings).

 

Task 2 activities – (Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata and University of Surrey)

• Implementation the set of standardized definitions identified for diseases selected in Task 1 into a general population-based register data dictionary
• Blueprints for adjusting and further developing a suite of open source software for data management, statistical analysis and automated delivery of indicators.
• Development of technical manuals, including sets of recommendations for personnel involved in data processing of population-based registers.

The CCM-BRIDGE project

To support the activities of BRIDGE Health at national level, the Italian Ministry of Health (Center for Disease Control, CCM) has also launched the CCM-BRIDGE project “Creation and development of the Italian network to support the European project BRIDGE Health aimed to support structuring and sustainability of the European activities in health information (HI)”. The project was led and coordinated by the National Institute of Health.

 

For more information visit the page dedicated to CCM-BRIDGE project.