Yesterday, the NZ National Heart Foundation published a web article titled ‘Biggest NZ nationwide study has global impact’.
It outlined the findings of a two-year-long, national, randomised trial to examine the effect of providing ambulatory oxygen to patients suspected of suffering a heart attack. This has long been a practice observed due to its suspected benefit, however this benefit has never been confirmed.
This study is the largest randomised trial to date in NZ, involving 40,000 patients, and it was made possible by leveraging off of the ANZACS-QI system, a national cardiology registry provided by Enigma to the NZ Ministry of Health, and deployed into each NZ hospital, nationwide.
The core ANZACS-QI registry system has been extended, using funding from the ANZACS-QI Registry Trials Group to include a ‘studies module’ which provides bolt-on templates for a range of associated studies.
The studies module allows patients from the core ANZACS-QI cohort to be included in appropriate research cohorts, and for additional, study-specific information to be collected on them, perhaps including study-specific workflows and additional subsequent (post-discharge) data capture. It also provides the potential for external healthcare providers to contribute additional information on patients after they have left the hospital setting.
For this study, data relating to Oxygen-as-a-therapy was retrospectively collected on all patients who were entered into the ANZACS-QI Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) data collections, on a single randomised day each month. Oxygen fields were present on all days, for all patients, but were made mandatory for patients who entered the hospital system on those specific, randomly selected days. In this way, the normal clinical practice of providers was not affected nor influenced in any way, by the presence of the study.
For more details on the study’s findings visit: https://www.heartfoundation.org.nz/about-us/news/media-releases/biggest-nz-nationwide-study-has-global-impact
Enigma is proud to have played a part in this and wishes to acknowledge and thank the NHF for their support of this study.