What is a registry? Patient registries help practices identify populations of patients, e.g., all patients with diabetes or hypertension, all men over age 50, or all women who need to have mammograms.

Three Quest Teams—Preventive Care, Reducing Secondary Cardiovascular Risk, and ICSI Guideline Implementation—worked diligently in 2008 and all arrived at a similar conclusion: That physician practices in our region need registries in order to provide optimal preventive care and to help patients lower the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

Medical practices that do the best job of helping patients stay healthy use registries to identify missed services or treatment goals. They measure their success and make changes to provide better patient care. Electronic health records help, but are not essential to implementing a registry.

The Quest Registry Team's goal is to help physician practices develop patient registries. The pilots started in July 2009 using the free registry program Chronic Disease Electronic Management System (CDEMS) at two sites. With this pilot, each site is compiling data on patients for diabetes, coronary heart disease, and some of the preventive health medicine. After this initial pilot, the team will review the results of the pilot and develop a registry template for practices in the region.

As physician practices utilize the patient registry, they can determine how successful they are at providing their patients with optimal preventive care services and to making them healthier people. The doctors will be able to identify and contact the patients whose latest exam or diagnostic test is past the recommended guideline time. The goal of the team is to roll out patient registry to the entire region, which will provide patients the best care that is beneficial to them at the time they should be receiving it.

Patient Registry Team

Team Lead: Jean Kestner, Methodist Medical Center of Illinois
Black Belt: Cheryl Toland, Quality Quest for Health of Illinois

Team Members: Seema Alikhan, Quality Quest; Jim Dobbins, Decatur Memorial; John Houser, MD, OSF; Michael Jongerius, MD, Independent Practitioner; Richard Luetkemeyer, MD, Cat; Nancy Moersch, Illinois Quality Improvement Organization; Terry Murray, Quello Clinic, MN; Jan Simkins, Pekin Hospital; Bev Steele, Proctor Hospital; Bruce Steffens, MD, United Healthcare; Beth Thomas, RN, Pekin Hospital; Anita Timmons, Internal Medicine Group of Peoria; David Trachtenbarg, MD, MMCI