The Swedish Rheumatology Quality Register: optimisation of rheumatic disease assessments using register-enriched data.

New therapeutic options are constantly emerging for the treatment of rheumatic diseases. To evaluate the safety and efficacy of newly introduced anti-rheumatic treatment alternatives, registers are an important source of information. The Swedish Rheumatology Quality Register (SRQ) collects clinical data on patients with rheumatoid arthritis, as well as other rheumatic diseases, and may be enriched with data on comorbid conditions, prescription drug dispensings, and mortality from national data sources in Sweden. In this setting, many different outcomes can be investigated over a long period of time in a diverse population of patients recruited in daily clinical practice.