The Nordic perioperative and intensive care registries—Collaboration and research possibilities

BACKGROUND: The Nordic perioperative and intensive care registries have been built up during the last 25 years to improve quality in intensive and perioperative care. We aimed to describe the Nordic perioperative and intensive care registries and to highlight possibilities and challenges in future research collaboration between these registries. MATERIAL AND METHOD: We present an overview of the following Nordic registries: Swedish Perioperative Registry (SPOR), the Danish Anesthesia Database (DAD), the Finnish Perioperative Database (FIN-AN), the Icelandic Anesthesia Database (IS-AN), the Danish Intensive Care Database (DID), the Swedish Intensive Care Registry (SIR), the Finnish Intensive Care Consortium, the Norwegian Intensive Care and Pandemic Registry (NIPaR), and the Icelandic Intensive Care Registry (IS-ICU). RESULTS: Health care systems and patient populations are similar in the Nordic countries. Despite certain differences in data structure and clinical variables, the perioperative and intensive care registries have enough in common to enable research collaboration. In the future, even a common Nordic registry could be possible. CONCLUSION: Collaboration between the Nordic perioperative and intensive care registries is both possible and likely to produce research of high quality. Research collaboration between registries may have several add-on effects and stimulate international standardization regarding definitions, scoring systems, and benchmarks, thereby improving overall quality of care.