How to involve important parties - BFCC at the German Congress of Health Services Research 2017

On October 4-6 the 16th German Congress of Health Services Research (DKVF) took place in Berlin. The DKVF 2017 gathered under the topic "Future of Regional Healthcare – Research, Innovation, Cooperation" international experts to analyse the main challenges of healthcare systems and show how these challenges can be met by innovative healthcare concepts including cross-sectoral and cross-professional cooperation.

The BFCC project contributed to the session on the relevance of registries for clinical healthcare research. Henriette Rau from the Institute for Community Medicine at the University Medicine Greifswald (UMG) – the leading partner of the BFCC project for technical infrastructure and data management – presented how data management is technically implemented in the planned transnational, web-based fracture registry platform (TFRP). BFCC’s TFRP will connect hospitals in various EU countries of the Baltic Sea Region.

Already existing fracture registries only cover particular aspects of fracture management like the clinical data capture of operations caused by fractures, or focus only on particular fracture types. A transnational fracture data collection and fracture-related complications, especially infections, are of great clinical importance and are the focal point of the BFCC project. So far, these aspects were not the primary concern in the implementation of registries within the involved countries. Consequently, the presentation’s audience acknowledged the importance of a transnational fracture registry and showed great interest in the BFCC project. Furthermore, the participants of the congress discussed questions like:

• How to motivate physicians to participate in the BFCC registry and to enter data?
• How can interested institutions participate in the BFCC registry?
• How are industrial partners involved in research?

The DKVF2017 session on registries and the resulting lively exchange of information afterwards, highlighted the importance of registries for clinical healthcare research, and the positive direction of the BFCC project.