'There's a pressing need for National Clinical Registry of COVID-19,' says ICMR

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and All India Institue of Medical Science (AIIMS) have made a recommendation to form a National Clinical Registry of COVID-19. In order to take this forward, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has invited tenders of letter of intent from COVID care centres and hospitals to be a part of this National Clinical Registry of COVID-19 (NCRC). 

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National Clinical Registry of COVID-19

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The NCRC is aimed at collecting real-time clinical data which will help the official in conducting research and put together protocols and guidelines based on evidence. This will also aid the policymaking process and ensure that we have better patient management strategies, predicting disease severity as well as patient outcomes. 

"There is a pressing need for the collection of systematic data on clinical signs & symptoms, laboratory investigations, management protocols, the 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," ICMR said.

"A systematically collected, comprehensive database covering different regions of the country will enable both researchers and policymakers to generate pertinent hypotheses, to inform crucial understanding of COVID 19, to detect trends in the progression of the pandemic and to accordingly calibrate the response to the pandemic," said an official.

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There is a lot about COVID-19 that still remains unknowns as the researchers' race against time to discover. This move will also help the authorities collect evidence-based data on the signs, symptoms, and health conditions related to coronavirus.

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The NCRC will collect data from 100 hospitals across the country for the next one year to understand this highly contagious virus. This data will then be analysed by a team of scientists at ICMR and will be used to generate hypotheses for various parameters of the COVID-19 disease. This National Clinical Registery of COVID-19 is the need of the hour and will be useful for future studies as well. 

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This NCRC project will be funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research. The dedicated COVID-19 hospitals and COVID care centres enrolled with the NCRC will be trained, mentored, and supervised by 15 reputed medical institutes across India. This list of hospitals has been listed in the tender notice published by ICMR.

The Indian Council of Medical Research aims to ensure that the National Clinical Registery of COVID-19 has adequate representation from all zones, states, union territories and has diversity.

(With inputs from PTI)