For patients

Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death and disability in Australia. Each year there are approximately 56,000 heart attacks across the country. It’s a major burden on individuals, and our society at large.

As both our ability to diagnose heart conditions and the technology to treat them have advanced, we’ve seen an increase in numbers of cardiac procedures, often involving minor or major surgery. While there is clear evidence that such procedures can be effective, they are often expensive to our health service, and may also carry substantial risks for patients.

It’s important that we clearly understand the risks and benefits of these procedures, both in terms of patient health and wellbeing, and financial costs.

Clinical Quality Registries are an ideal way to measure the safety, quality and effectiveness of such treatments.

What is a Clinical Quality Registry?

Clinical Quality Registries (CQRs) are large databanks of health information used to assess and report on the quality of health care with the aim of facilitating health service improvement.

Information collected by CQRs help healthcare staff understand whether the care they are delivering is safe and effective, and provided in a timely and appropriate manner.

In order to improve the quality of cardiac care, we need to know what factors contribute to procedural complications, and which procedures have the most successful outcomes. That’s what the Victorian Cardiac Outcomes Registry (VCOR) aims to establish.

A registry such as VCOR collects:

Core pre-procedural data (see the What information is collected section below for detail)
Data that is able to be matched to other Victorian databases, providing more detail regarding the patient’s journey and outcomes

All relevant cases at participating health services are included.

What is VCOR?

VCOR was established to collect information about cardiac treatments and interventions performed in Victorian hospitals. The aim of the Registry is to improve the safety and quality of cardiovascular healthcare to patients in Victoria.

FAQs

The registry is stored on secure services at Monash University. The VCOR database is managed under an ISO/IEC 27001 compliant Information Security Management System (ISMS). Conformity with ISO/IEC 27001 means that an organization or business has put in place a system to manage risks related to the security of data owned or handled by the company, and that this system respects all the best practices and principles enshrined in this International Standard.
If you do not wish to participate in the Registry, you MUST contact VCOR directly to advise that you DO NOT want your information included. Please refer to the information provided on our Opt-out of VCOR page.
VCOR is approved by a Human Research Ethics Committee at every participating hospital. If you have any ethical concerns about this project, questions about your rights as a participant, or would like to make a complaint about research conduct, you should contact the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) at the hospital where you were treated.
VCOR produce general reports on cardiac outcomes for public, government, clinical and academic audiences. These publications will help to inform us about common trends and/or gaps that may exist in service provision. No publication or report will ever contain any identifying information about patients.
Researchers may use anonymised group data for future research projects however, any research using VCOR data will require specific approval by a Human Research Ethics Committee.
VCOR collects information about you, the patient; your health before during and after your hospital admission; and details about the treatments you received. The Registry also collects some data about your health and quality of life in the 30 days after you were discharged from hospital (for patients who had undergone certain procedures). For example:
- Hospital Identification Number
- Name
- Date of Birth
- Contact Information (Phone Number and Postcode)
- Medicare or Department of Veterans Affairs Number
- The name of the hospital
- The reason for the treatment you received
- Basic information about your health status before, during and after the procedure
- Complications (if any)
- Discharge information
- Health and quality of life information after discharge
Information is taken directly from hospital medical records and entered into the secure VCOR web-based database by hospital staff.
Hospital staff may contact your directly to see how you have been in the 30 days since leaving hospital. This should only take 5-10 minutes of your time. Staff will remind you that the information you provide may be used in the Registry and you can choose to opt out of the Registry at this point.
Allowing VCOR to include your information in the Registry will not affect any treatment you receive.