Facility registries: metadata for where care is delivered

Comprehensively identifying and monitoring health facilities where care is delivered is critical to care coordination as well as public health. This became poignantly clear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, few sources exist which can provide canonical identification of healthcare facilities. Furthermore, quantifying facility-specific services and infrastructure in a standard manner ranges from insufficient to nonexistent. A health facility registry 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 facility registry and provides scenarios in which stakeholders would benefit from facility data. The chapter further discusses unique identifiers, data collection, and the metadata necessary for establishing and maintaining a facility registry.