GLOBAL REACH FOR EUREQUO

EUREQUO Goes Global is an exciting new initiative from ESCRS which will give cataract and refractive surgeons all over the world the opportunity to record, monitor and compare their results. The European Registry of Quality Outcomes for Cataract and Refractive Surgery (EUREQUO) started as an initiative co-financed by the European Union, under the Executive Agency for Health and Consumers and the ESCRS. Eleven national societies across Europe participated as associated partners in the project. The aims of the project were to improve treatment and standards of care for cataract and refractive surgery, make a significant impact on the exchange of best practice in relation to patient safety and to develop evidence-based guidelines for cataract and refractive surgery across Europe. During the project, surgeons and clinics from 16 countries reported data to the EUREQUO database. After three and a half years, more than 800,000 cataract extractions have been reported to the database. Benchmarking and clinical improvement work has been done by clinics and clinical guidelines for cataract surgery based on the database have been published in the June issue of JCRS.

Improving outcomes

EUREQUO provides a means to audit surgical results and encourages surgeons to make adjustments to their techniques and improve their outcomes. Today, almost one million cataract surgeries have been recorded in the system. This number is expected to increase substantially with EUREQUO Goes Global by giving the opportunity to all ESCRS members to access the system free of charge. The system can be reached via the EUREQUO web portal for manual input of data at https://eurequo.net. The user can choose between cataract and refractive surgery and in both systems there is one form for preoperative and surgical data and another form for follow-up data. Surgeons or clinics sign up for participation via the EUREQUO website (www.eurequo.org) and you can get a username and a password for log in. Individual patient data is anonymous in the registry but each participating centre guarantees a possibility to trace the registered surgical procedure to the relevant medical record in the centre.

This is for making an audit process possible. Data can also be entered into the database from existing national registries or electronic medical record (EMR) systems by an interface. The output statistics are either frequency tables or graphs. Both systems give one preoperative and surgical report and one follow-up report. It is also possible to export own data from the system as an Excel file. Each centre/surgeon can only get access to own data and aggregated data for a country (any participating country) and the whole database. This means that output data for a centre/surgeon is anonymous to everyone else. The output tables and graphs are standard reports with the possibility of making selections on gender, age, time period, type of operation, co-morbidity and complex surgery. This covers most of the wishes about output from the system. For more sophisticated statistical procedures export of data as an Excel file will enable the centre/surgeon to make their own customised output reports and advanced statistics.