Facility Registries: Metadata for Where Care Is Delivered

Abstract Comprehensively identifying and appraising health care facilities where care is delivered is important to health care reform, both in the United States and internationally. Currently, few sources exist which can provide canonical identification of health care facilities. Furthermore, quantifying facility-specific services and infrastructure in a standard manner ranges from insufficient to nonexistent. A health facility registry (FR) provides a central authority to store, manage, and share health facility identification, services, and resources data with a wide range of stakeholders. Such universal collection and standardization of these data may support care coordination, public health responsiveness, quality improvement, health services research, health service planning, and health policy development. This chapter introduces the concept of a FR and provides scenarios in which stakeholders would benefit from facility data. This chapter further discusses unique identifiers, data collection, and the metadata necessary for establishing and maintaining an FR.