Swedish guidelines for registry-based randomized clinical trials

During the last decade Sweden has invested in a national infrastructure for collection of structured clinical data in the form of healthcare registries (in Sweden known as Kvalitetsregister). These data can be combined with other public data using the national personal identifiers that are issued to Swedish citizens. The healthcare registries have an almost complete coverage of Swedish healthcare, and a large network of clinicians is involved in the quality assurance and continuous improvement of healthcare using these registries. Uppsala Clinical Research Center (UCR) has been a technology provider of large-scale national registries and has a strong background in clinical trial management. This effort combines the areas of healthcare registries and clinical trials into a novel way of performing clinical trials to be able to: 1) run clinical trials as an integrated part of normal clinic workflow; and 2) leverage the nationwide network of outcome reporting. This strategy was shown to be successful in the TASTE (Thrombus Aspiration in Myocardial Infarction) study. When TASTE had been published, the New England Journal of Medicine wrote a perspective on the study calling it ‘The randomized registry trial—the next disruptive technology in clinical research?’ Since then several studies have been conducted in this way with great success. UCR has been appointed, by Clinical Studies Sweden and the Swedish Research Council, to develop the Swedish national guidelines for registry-based randomized clinical trials in order to ensure the possibility for more organizations to run this kind of study. This paper describes key concepts of register-based randomized clinical trials and the development of Swedish national guidelines.