QRC Stockholm (QRC) is a Regional registry centre for National Quality Registries (NQR) and also forms a strategic cooperation between Karolinska Institutet (KI) and the Stockholm County Council. QRC contributes to:

• The development of NQR functionality and utility
  Continuous improvement of health care quality and outcomes
  
• NQR related research
  
• Partnerships with patients in all the above activities
  
• QRC supports regional cooperation of NQR, developing their functionality and means to improve health care and research at a regional level.
  
• QRC cooperates with national actors and other regional competence centres to develop NQR.

QRC Stockholm’s vision is to create the best possible health for each patient through knowledge, support and evidence based knowledge for best practice care.

Regional registry centres for the National Quality Registries have been established in Sweden and today there are six of them of which QRC Stockholm is one. In a Registry centre, several registries share the costs for staff, systems and development that a single registry could not bear, e.g. in technical support, analytical work, and use of registry data to support clinical quality improvement, and helping to make registry data useful for different users. Hence, a continued development of the registries can be assured although the system follows a decentralized model, i.e. each register is governed by a professional collaboration.

Definition of a quality register

A national quality registry contains individualized data concerning patient diagnosis, medical interventions, and outcomes after treatment. Such data are shared between all care providers in specific area e.g. surgical interventions, acute diseases, chronic conditions or patient groups such as elderly or palliative care regardless of diagnosis.

A system of national quality registries has been established in the Swedish health and medical services in the last decades. Each NQR is annually reviewed and approved for financial support by an Executive Committee. There are about 100 registries that receive central funding in Sweden.

National vision

National Quality Registers are used in an integrated and active way for continuous learning, improvement, research and management to create the best possible health and care together with the individual.