Researchers and clinicians from Indiana University School of Medicine at the Indiana Center for Regenerative Medicine and Engineering, Regenstrief Institute, Indiana Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and Indiana University Health are looking to create a comprehensive wound care registry. This partnership could help solve issues of chronic wounds affecting many Hoosiers, aid research, and build relations with private industries.
The creation of a chronic wound care registry is possible due to a collaboration between Regenstrief Institute and the ICRME and would serve as an evidence-based tool to improve outcomes for patients of the IU Health system's Comprehensive Wound Care Center.
Establishing a registry requires the development of a data structure and database where wound care data can be imported from current electronic health record systems and health information exchanges. The registry allows for data to be organized and curated as a research-ready data set, enabling significant data in performing high-quality research studies and promoting evidence-generating medicine. The evidence generated from the registry can then be translated to clinical practice and hence improve the wound healing trajectory and outcomes.
"With this history, we can track how products are being used for what indications and what are the outcomes and where the outcomes are good,” said Chandan Sen, PhD, Director of the Indiana Center for Regenerative Medicine and Engineering. "That information is critical, and where outcomes are bad, that's even more important because that helps us define our scope of work."
Registries are powerful tools to identify trends in disease and monitor quality improvement, cost projection, and epidemiological information.
Sen explained that the biggest advantage is seeing how products the ICRME as well as other researcher labs create are performing in a real-world setting through the registry. Usually, researchers can only see how a product performs in a study. These studies are always in a controlled environment, and in real life these controls don't exist.
Future work for the registry includes increasing the number of facilities in Indiana that contribute information. Growing the pool of contributors may produce benefits such as enabling epidemiological description of the burden of chronic wounds in Indiana, improving resource allocation to combat the economic burden that chronic wounds impose, and developing data-driven wound care strategies through the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
This tool will help future research as it narrows the scope of what does and does not work in a lab setting.
Sen said the registry would be a helpful tool for fostering industry partnerships with entities that may also want to know how particular products are performing, allowing IU School of Medicine to provide accurate, in-house information while most registries are created by a for-profit organization with high price tags. This wound care registry would allow IU to generate the same information but instead, use profits to help researchers create a compounding source of progress in this field.
