Cleveland Clinic’s Glickman Urological & Kidney Institute Joins National Registry to Benefit Prostate Cancer Patients

Cleveland Clinic’s Glickman Urological & Kidney Institute and Cleveland Clinic Florida have joined the American Urological Association’s Quality (AQUA) Registry, a national clinical registry designed to measure and report healthcare quality and patient outcomes in urology.

Urologists at both Cleveland Clinic locations will be working with the AQUA Registry to collect and track patients’ demographics, comorbidities, treatments and outcome information, enabling comparative effectiveness research on the association between treatment and outcomes.

“The AQUA Registry really examines the patient’s perspective in the delivery of urologic care,” said Eric Klein, M.D., chairman of the Glickman Urological & Kidney Institute. “Joining the registry will allow us to further improve our quality performance, based on clinically validated, comparative and patient-reported outcome data.”

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the AQUA Registry qualifies as a specialized registry within the “Meaningful Use” Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program and is the only specialty-wide urologic registry that can generate national benchmarks.

“Through this registry, urologists can compare outcomes of their patients with prostate cancer to those of more than 2,300 practitioners throughout the country and better positions them to be able to benchmark their own care to improve clinical practice and patient outcomes,” said Howard Goldman, M.D., professor and vice chair of Glickman’s Quality and Patient Safety program.

Through the aggregation and organization of clinical- and patient-reported data on diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, outcomes and resource utilization, the registry will provide the urologic community with a definitive resource for informing and advancing urology care within the United States.

“It is an honor to welcome the Cleveland Clinic to the AQUA Registry,” said Dr. J. Quentin Clemens, chair of the AUA Data Committee. “The Cleveland Clinic has distinguished itself as one of the top hospital systems in the United States, and their physicians’ expertise and commitment to the improvement of quality of care and patient experience deserve commendation. Together we will grow the AQUA Registry and make it a national platform for improving urologic care.”

The AQUA Registry currently focuses on prostate cancer, but it will gradually expand to include other urological conditions.