EuroHeart: European Unified Registries On Heart Care Evaluation and Randomized Trials

In July 2019, the ESC Board agreed to co-ordinate and sponsor the development of the European Unified Registries On Heart care Evaluation And Randomized Trials (EuroHeart) for supporting assessment and improvement of quality of cardiovascular care in Europe based on continuous recording of individual patient data. EuroHeart will offer a common IT- and dataset infrastructure, which will allow participating countries to undertake continuous quality improvement, with the added value of providing a platform for observational and randomized research and post-marketing surveillance of new devices and pharmacotherapies. The national quality development programme, infrastructure, and the database will belong to each participating country. The EuroHeart will have the potential to stepwise include most ESC countries, which could either adopt the proposed EuroHeart common infrastructure or align already existing systems to the EuroHeart data collection. The EuroHeart project will focus on common disease areas: ACS-PCI, valve disease, heart failure, and atrial fibrillation. Initially, EuroHeart will develop standardized datasets and quality indicators for these diseases and devices. In parallel, the SWEDEHEART IT-platform will be updated to be internationally available and transferable, under a license agreement, to participating countries. During the first 2 years, the EuroHeart system will be implemented and evaluated in 2–4 countries. Following this pilot phase, the EuroHeart project may be rolled out to other countries. EuroHeart will also develop a Data Science Centre coordinating similar statistical analyses from participating countries. When implemented in several ESC member countries, EuroHeart will have the potential to improve the standards of cardiovascular care, monitor the safety of new devices and medications, and provide an important collaborative infrastructure for observational research and within-registry randomized controlled trials. © 2019 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.