Union health minister Harsh Vardhan on Monday inaugurated the National Covid-19 Registry and a vaccine web portal aimed at collecting quality real-time clinical data on the Coronavirus disease (Covid19) patients from hospitals and laboratories.
It will also document India’s efforts towards developing vaccines against the disease.
The need for maintaining a registry was felt as documentation and description of the cases infected by Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, and their course of illness is imperative for obtaining useful information regarding the illness, its behaviour in various groups of patients and the natural history of the disease.
Context specific information in patients with tuberculosis or malnutrition as comorbidity is also pertinent to document as it may particularly influence clinical decision making and policy updates in the Indian setting.
The registry will follow a hub and spoke model with primary data being collected in the electronic data capture form by satellite centres that are dedicated Covid-19 hospitals that are being trained, mentored and supervised by medical institutes of national repute chosen region-wise.
The registry is being rolled out in phases, and the duration of the registry is at least for a year.
{{/usCountry}}The registry is being rolled out in phases, and the duration of the registry is at least for a year.
{{/usCountry}}In the first phase, 50 satellite centres and 14 registry sites have been included. The Central Implementation Committees have been constituted to provide supportive supervision, along with a steering committee of experts that has been put in place to provide overarching guidance.
Among the 14 registry sites, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh is chosen to coordinate with states such as Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh. All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, and All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur, will handhold Delhi and Bihar, and Rajasthan respectively. King George’s Medical University, Lucknow, will take care of Uttar Pradesh.
In the Western part of the country, NHL Municipal Medical College, Ahmedabad, will handle Gujarat, Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli; and Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, is handling the state of Maharashtra and Goa.
In the east, Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research, Kolkata, will be the mentor for West Bengal; and All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar, will collect data from Odisha.
Data from south Indian states of Karnataka, and Telangana, Andhra Pradesh will be collected by National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru, and Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences, Hyderabad, respectively.
Central India— Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, will be handled by All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhopal, and All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Raipur.
All eight north eastern states will be handled by the North-Eastern Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health and Medical Sciences, in Shillong.
Data management for the registry, including the development of the electronic data capture form, is being done by ICMR’s National Institute of Medical Statistics. There will be full confidentiality maintained as patient identifiers are not being collected as part of the process.
The vaccine web portal that was also launched alongside has a detailed information on development of Covid-19 vaccine candidates, especially the three candidates that are currently under advanced stages of human trials in India.
“The portal provides useful and important information related to vaccine development, ongoing clinical trials and progress made in this area locally and globally at regular intervals. Today, in the times of Covid, vaccine development is watched very closely. Thus, it becomes important to showcase the status of vaccine development in the country,” said Harsh Vardhan, during the launch.
Apart from Covid-19, the portal also has information on other vaccines such as those against Cholera, hepatitis, HPV, Shigella etc.
“Both the Clinical Covid-19 Registry and Vaccine portal are live and functional,” said Dr Balram Bhargava, director general, ICMR.