Summary
Background: Disease registries rely on consistent electronic data capturing (EDC) pertinent to
their objectives; either by using existing electronic data as far as available, or
by implementing specific software solutions.
Objectives: To describe the current practice of an international disease registry (European Surveillance
System on Contact Allergies, ESSCA, www.essca-dc.org) against different state of the art approaches for EDC.
Methods: Since 2002, ESSCA is collecting data, currently from 53 departments in 12 countries.
Departmental EDC software ranges from spreadsheets to comprehensive “patch test software”
based on a relational database. In the Erlangen data centre, such diverse data is
imported, converted to a common format, quality checked and pooled for scientific
analyses.
Results: Feed-back to participating departments for quality control is provided by standardised
reports. Varying author teams publish scientific analyses addressing the objective
of contact allergy surveillance.
Conclusions: Although ESSCA represents a historically grown, heterogeneous network and not one
unified approach to EDC, some of its features have contributed to its viability in
the last 12 years and may be useful to consider for similar investigator-initiated
networks.
Keywords
Registry - dermatitis - allergic contact dermatitis - epidemiologic surveillance