India plans to set up Covid-19 registry

The government has decided to launch a National COVID 19 Clinical Registry to collect the standardized data regarding clinical and laboratory features, treatments, and outcomes of hospitalized patients in the country.

How will it work?

The Indian Council of Medical Research has asked for all the relevant information from the hospitals treating the COVID 19 patients and the health centres across the country to join the project and also declare the name of 15 hospitals that are supposed to act as mentor institutions for their assigned states. The ICMR will launch it after that along with the Health Ministry and AIIMS, New Delhi.

How this decision has been arrived at?

A direction to this effect was given by the National COVID Task Force to the ICMR in order to study the clinical features of COVID 19 patients in the country and their diagnostic and prognostic value in different age and gender groups in the country. It was required since a collated feed of systematic data would help the government take decisions with all the information at its disposal.

What will be the National COVID 19 Clinical Registry?

The NCRC will be a joint project by the ICMR, the Union Health Ministry and AIIMS, New Delhi. This will act towards collecting good quality real-time clinical data to inform evidence-based clinical practice, research, formulating guidelines and policy-making.

Objective of NCRC

This NCRC will work for the following purposes:

• Study the frequency, clinical and laboratory features, treatments and outcomes of COVID 19 related multisystem inflammatory disorder in children and adolescents.
• Analyze the national registry and utilize data to answer research questions on the infectious disease.
• This will serve as a platform also for additional clinical research studies in selected sites and will help collect follow-up data of discharged COVID 19 patients.

The government will use this information to make the treatment of COVID 19 more data-driven and effective in the country, with this new mechanism.

Month: Current Affairs - August, 2020