The Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Thoracic Clinical Quality Registry (ANZTHOR) has recently been established by the Australian & New Zealand Society of Cardiac & Thoracic Surgeons (ANZSCTS) as part of its efforts to provide a clinical quality registry for the routine collection and monitoring of surgical procedure data on all Thoracic Surgery performed in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

The ANZTHOR Registry is governed by a Steering Committee and reports to the ANZCTS. The initial phase of establishing the ANZTHOR Registry is being overseen by the Registry Steering Committee in consultation with BioGrid, who hosts and manages the Registry on behalf of the ANZSCTS and the Steering Committee. The Steering Committee is responsible for quality assurance and reporting in collaboration with BioGrid.

The focus of the ANZTHOR Registry is to ensure that patients undergoing thoracic surgical procedures receive high quality surgical care and as it matures, establish benchmarks for outcomes of Thoracic Surgery in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Features of the ANZTHOR Registry include:

• Online cloud-based REDCap platform with no cost to contributing hospitals
• Open to all centres including regional hospitals performing Thoracic Surgery
• Dynamic reporting tool using SAS Visual Analytics for ‘live’ unit audit presentations and individual performance
• Novel Key Performance Indicators specific for modern Thoracic Oncology outcomes with ‘Quality Indicator Score’
• Provide Trainees with linked Logbook data for RACS
• Ability to integrate with existing data management systems and link with EMRs
• Capability to add modules and datasets for multi-centre registry trials

The ANZTHOR REDCap Data Dictionary Codebook provides detail of the data collected in the Registry. The Registry has also been designed to connect to the BioGrid data linkage platform, enabling data to be used for approved collaborative clinical audit and research projects.

BioGrid assists with on-boarding hospitals to the Registry. This includes managing the ethics, governance and contracting required to on-board a centre, as well as working with each centre on solutions for the integration of data from other data sources into the Registry.

Ethical approval has been obtained for the Registry and sites around Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand for the collection of both retrospective and prospective demographic, pre-operative, post-operative, and clinical data using an opt-out model of consent.

At present, fully approved (ethics and governance approved) sites include:

• Royal Melbourne Hospital public, VIC
• Royal Melbourne Hospital private, VIC
• Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, NSW
• St Vincent’s Public Health, Melbourne, VIC
• St Vincent’ Private Health, Melbourne, VIC

Sites undergoing governance review include:

• Ballart base Hospital, VIC
• Box Hill Hospital, VIC
• Northern Hospital, VIC
• Royal Hobart Hospital, TAS
• St John of God Hospital, VIC
• Warringal Private Hospital, VIC

Future sites to undergo governance review include:

• Austin Health, VIC
• Fiona Stanley Hospital, WA
• Flinders Medical Centre, SA
• Gold Coast University Hospital, QLD
• Prince Charles Hospital, QLD
• Princess Alexandra Hospital, QLD
• Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, QLD
• St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney, NSW
• Townsville Hospital, QLD
• Wairo Waikato Hospital, Hamilton, NZ
• Wellington Regional Hospital, NZ
• Western Health, VIC

For further information about the ANZTHOR Registry, including how to participate in the Registry, email enquiries@biogrid.org.au or phone BioGrid on +61 3 9342 2690.