Past, Present, and Future of Contact Dermatitis Registries in the Internet Era
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Contact Dermatitis (A Gimenez-Arnau, Section Editor)
Past, Present, and Future of Contact Dermatitis Registries in the Internet Era Leopoldo Borrego, PhD Address Servicio de Dermatología, Hospital Universitario Insular, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Avda Marítima del Sur s/n, 35016, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain Email: [email protected]
* Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This article is part of the Topical Collection on Contact Dermatitis Keywords Contact dermatitis I Registry I Electronic health record; electronic data record I Epidemiological surveillance
Abstract Purpose of review Digital data are invading all areas of our lives including medical practice. Digital technology grows up exponentially. Technical concerns as memory storage or processor speed are not limitations in medical data management and huge medical registries will be created in a short period of time. Epidemiological surveillance has been one of the most important issues in contact dermatitis research networks and adaptation to the new advances is mandatory. Recent findings Digital technology can provide enough software to achieve research epidemiologic goals that were impossible 20 years ago. Legal concerns about confidentiality and simultaneous management of clinical data for daily workflow and for research are limitations of this advance. Summary If clinicians want to update our contact dermatitis registries, it is vital to carry out two tasks: establish a standard for the variables required in the data registry and obtain Electronic Health Record programs that enable the simultaneous handling of standardized data at the clinical level and their export in real time to a referral center for epidemiologic surveillance and research.
Introduction Contact dermatitis is an inflammatory cutaneous process produced after skin exposure to an external
substance. Depending on the mechanism involved, it is classified as irritant or allergic contact dermatitis [1].
Contact Dermatitis (A Gimenez-Arnau, Section Editor) Patch testing is the main diagnostic tool to determine the substances to which patients may be sensitized and thereby possibly cause their allergic contact dermatitis. Whilst the individual result of patch testing is needed for the patient to be able to know which substances to avoid, epidemiologically, it is necessary to know the grouped data of these tests. This epidemiological
surveillance enables the establishment of the occupational or legal measures required to prevent the population being exposed to these substances. Indeed, awareness and analysis of the patch test results of each individual department is one of the main internal quality control measures for the method of performing the patch tests [2, 3•, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].
Past Contact Dermatitis Units traditionally recorded the results of their patch tests on spreadsheets, which later formed the basis for local, regional, and national studies [9••]. Once pooled, however, the lack of standardization resulted in a great effort to achieve homogenous d
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