October 30, 2015 — The American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association and The Society of Thoracic Surgeons released a new statement in early October on the future of clinical registries titled ACC/AHA/STS Statement on the Future of Registries and the Performance Measurement Enterprise.
Clinical registries are observational databases focused on clinical conditions, procedures, therapies or populations. The goal of registries is to capture data that reflect real-world clinical practice in patient populations.
“Registries are fundamental to healthcare quality and improvement,” said Deepak L. Bhatt, M.D., M.P.H., FACC, FAHA, executive director of intervention cardiovascular programs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and chair of the writing committee. “Registries can support the development, implementation and evaluation of performance measures as tools for improving patient care and communicating meaningful information to patients regarding quality.”
The statement examines the current state of clinical registries while acknowledging their future growth potential. The authors write that while there has been an “explosion” in the number of clinical registries over the past decade, there are still broad clinical areas and specific procedures that would benefit from the creation of a dedicated registry.
“The future will likely involve some degree of integration of electronic health records and administrative data sources with registry data,” Bhatt said.
The document was published online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes and The Annals of Thoracic Surgery.
For more information: www.acc.org, www.heart.org, www.sts.org
November 03, 2026 
