Health workers conduct a door-to-door survey in Chembur East area of Mumbai. (Express Photo by Amit Chakravarty)
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) Thursday asked institutions and hospitals identified as dedicated COVID-19 hospitals or health centres to participate in its project to establish a national clinical registry for this virus.
“There is a pressing need for collection of systematic data on clinical signs and symptoms, laboratory investigations, management protocols, clinical course of COVID-19 disease, disease spectrum and outcomes of patients. Such data will serve as an invaluable tool for formulating appropriate patient management strategies, predicting disease severity, patient outcomes, etc,” stated ICMR in its invitation. The registry aims to collect data from 100 hospitals across the country and the study is expected to last a year.
While the primary objective of the registry is to collect data related to the outcomes of the treatment provided to COVID-19 patients, it is also expected to help understand the way the disease progresses, its spectrum and risk factors, among other research questions. It will also be used to collect long term follow up data of discharged COVID-19 patients and will also serve as a platform for additional clinical research studies in selected sites.
The data will be stored in a central server or the NIC cloud and analysis will be done centrally by a team of ICMR scientists.
The Indian Express reported on July 30 that the ICMR was planning to launch a project to create a rigorous database of COVID-19 patients admitted in hospitals across the country in an effort to understand how treatment can be improved.