Pulmonologists now have a new way to gather data that would not usually be shared, thanks to a new registry from the American Association for Bronchology & Interventional Pulmonology (AABIP).
The launch of the AABIP Pulmonary Procedures Registry, powered by Eon, was unveiled at the recent AABIP conference held in Nashville Aug 11-13.
Participating healthcare providers initially will contribute data about endobronchial ultrasound bronchoscopies and later expand to other types of bronchoscopy and pulmonary procedures. The resource will be made available to all facility types and sizes nationwide.
"An individual facility may have a highly successful program but think how much more powerful the data they collect would be if more providers could analyze it," said Dr. George A. Eapen, AABIP's president. "The collaborative power we're harnessing is going to save lives by allowing participating providers to fine-tune their work and their capacity to track patients."
The registry will be supported by a subscription model, with three tiers offering varying degrees of data management automation.
On the registry sign-up page, Eapen describes the registry as a “necessary tool to advancing outcomes in our field.”
Deep understanding of patient outcomes starts with detailed information and analysis, and that requires the submission of high-quality data by clinicians, according the AABIP site.
The registry is designed to help practitioners:
The power of the registry to make a difference for individual patients comes from its ability to build on learning from all the patients who came before, its developers say.
"Healthcare outcomes are not being systematically observed automatically in a scalable manner, so each patient's experience becomes an anecdote rather than a data point," said Dr. Aki Alzubaidi, Eon’s founder and co-CEO. "Automation of a registry to collect real data on outcomes allows expansion of medical knowledge — the experience of each patient helps inform the decisions that clinicians make for those who come after."
Eon is a health data science company.
AABIP has worked to gather information from the fields of bronchology and interventional pulmonology ever since its 1992 launch. The organization was one of the first to weigh in with guidelines for suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients at the start of the global pandemic, initially recommending that bronchoscopies not be performed on those patients out of fear of transmission through aerosols.
As the pandemic stretched on, clinicians determined it was both essential and safe to perform bronchoscopies, with careful use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other precautions.
Interested pulmonology providers can learn more about the registry at aabronchology.org.
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