[Creating a European registry of patient registries--a service oriented approach].

Healthcare registries in European countries are producing a large amount of data that are difficult to share and which, for the lack of interoperability, do not meet the real needs of data users, i.e. various groups of researchers, professionals and patients. Also, data gathered from healthcare registries are usually considered as isolated islands of information, which makes the task of approaching these data an arduous one. The suggested solution to these problems lies in the service approach to health registries and the data contained within them. Applying the service approach to registries, the healthcare data can escape the narrow confines of health registries in which they reside by transforming them into packages of predefined services in accordance with the end-user needs, which introduces the concept of metadata registries as service catalogues. Such a model of a service-oriented metadata registry as a catalog of services is discussed here as a real possibility and a dire need. The purpose of such a metadata registry is the collection of relevant data from the service provider and delivery of a predefined and reusable set of services to the service consumer. Interoperability thus achieved transcends the traditional problems of data exchange because it comes to grips with the services intended for and defined by the end-user, and not relying solely on data as a final deliverable. At the European Union level, such a metadata registry is currently under development, with the working title PARENT (Patient Registry Initiative) 'Registry of registries'. The mission of this metadata registry is to combine all the relevant European patient registries into such a service-oriented model.