Data Sources and Information to be Collected for a Romanian Diabetes Register

Abstract

Diabetes is a serious condition that damages many systems and organs, mainly the blood vessels and the nerves. The importance of the diabetes and its complications, along with the prevalence of the disease makes it a major public health problem worldwide. The spread of diabetes and its complications can be evaluated, and action steps based on this information can be taken, by the use of national diabetes registers and databases. A register of a chronic disease (such as diabetes) is an application used to capture, manage and offer information about chronic diseases to support an organized management of patient health care. Till now in Romania there are there are only disparate initiatives at hospital level, without any systematized regional or national monitoring through registers. The aim of this paper was to identify a way to help in the developing a national register for diabetes, that makes use of current medical information sources, and to develop the structure of a diabetes register and database for diabetes in Romania. The paper presents the medical sources of information that can provide data to a diabetes register, their degree of trust, algorithms for entering new diabetes cases, or removing cases fron the register. The structure of a diabetes database, and registry, and for a form to input data in them is detailed in the article.