Over the last six months, AUGS, working in close collaboration with industry, the FDA, ACOG, SUFU and others, has been building a national registry for pelvic floor disorders, the AUGS PFD Outcomes Registry. Initially the registry will focus on surgical and non-surgical treatment of pelvic organ prolapse, but our goal is to eventually expand it to include stress incontinence and other PFDs. The PFD Outcomes Registry will be a national registry for providers who care for patients with PFDs to provide much needed information about the comparative effectiveness, quality of life and safety associated with surgical and nonsurgical treatments for PFD and ultimately to improve the quality of care for women with these conditions.

The registry will be an innovative, secure, web-based platform that will allow you to:

• Monitor patient outcomes for you and your practice including anatomic, quality of life and safety outcomes for all patients receiving treatment for POP including native tissue repairs, transvaginal mesh, sacrocolpopexy and pessary.  Enrolled patients will automatically be contacted by the system every 6 months to complete patient reported outcome measures via the web so you can keep track of your patients even if they can't make it back for regular office visits.
• Track and report surgical quality measures to fulfill upcoming Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) and Physician Quality and Reporting Systems (PQRS) requirements. We have also had initial conversations with the joint ABOG/ABU FPMRS Board toward a goal of allowing registry participation meet upcoming maintenance of certification (MOC) requirements for the subspecialty.
• Get real time reports including national benchmarking data for you and your practice to improve patient care.

The PFD Outcomes Registry will also be an invaluable resource for clinical studies and research about PFD treatment. Particiants and stakeholders will be able to propose and conduct research using existing de-identified registry data or embed prospective clinical studies within the registry. Industry will be using the registry to conduct their FDA postmarketing surveillance studies for transvaginal mesh products.

We have made substantial progress developing the registry since we began in January but still have lots more to do. I want to personally thank everyone who has been involved in this effort and particularly the AUGS Registry Scientific Committee (Leslee Subak, Cate Bradley, Emily Weber-Lebrun, Vivian Sung, Holly Richter, Cheryl Iglesia, Mimi Lukacz, Pam Moalli, Rony Adam, Quentin Clemens, Jeanne Ballard) who have volunteered hundreds of hours of work and conference calls in the last 6 months to get us where we are.

We are on track to be able to demo the Registry at the Annual Scientific Meeting in Chicago Oct 3-6 and launch in the first quarter of 2013.

Stay tuned for more information. An official press announcement is planned in the next few weeks and we will likely need volunteers to beta test the web platform or serve as initial sites in the coming months.

-Matt Barber