Using clinical registries to improve the quality of neurosurgical care.

Despite rising and unsustainable US health care costs, many stakeholders feel that the quality of medical services is limited and inconsistent. Value-based reforms are touted as the key to achieving health care system sustainability. Health care value is defined as quality delivered divided by cost incurred. Unfortunately, quality in health care is difficult to accurately define and methods to reliably assess and report health care quality are often lacking. Clinical registries have emerged as important mechanisms to define, measure, and promote health care quality. The purpose of this article is to describe the role of registries in neurosurgical quality improvement.