Plan to set up registry of hospitalised patients

NEWDELHI: A registry of hospitalised COVID-19 patients across the country is being mooted to collect real time data which will help improve treatment outcomes, analyse trends in the progression of the pandemic and calibrate response, officials said. The ICMR in collaboration with the Health Ministry and the AIIMS is planning to set up the National Clinical Registry which will help researchers and policy makers understand effectiveness of investigational therapies, adverse effects taking place and generate evidence for improving t he t r e at ment of Covid- 1 9 patients.

“The aim is to collect data of t he hospitali s e d Covid- 1 9 patients like clinical and laboratory features, their demographics, comorbidities, treatment outcomes, complications in all age groups among others,” officials said.

The novel coronavirus, SARSCOV-2 and the illness it is causing has so many unknown parameters that are a barrier to the proper understanding and management of the disease, they said.

“A systematically collected, comprehensive database covering different regions of the country will enable both researchers and policy makers to generate pertinent hypotheses, to inform crucial understanding of Covid19, to detect trends in the progression of the pandemic and to accordingly calibrate response to the pandemic,” an official said.

Fi f t e e n institutions of national repute including the Post Graduate Institute of Medic al Education & Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh, AIIMS Delhi, AIIMS Jodhpur, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru and Armed Forc e Medical Col l e g e i n Pune will connect with the hospitals and medical colleges to get them on board.

These 15 institutions would be the registry sites and would be mentoring around 100 Covid-19 hospitals which would be called satellite centres from where the data would be collected as part of the exercise.