DIABNOR – a register study of medical quality in diabetes health care

The purpose of creating the DIABNOR register is to study the quality of diabetes care in Norway. We will study the prevalence of serious complications ("hard endpoints") and what kind of treatment patients receive and how these vary with age, gender, ethnicity, education and place of residence. It is a crosssectional study based on data from all hospital contacts in Norway between 2004 and 2010, linked to the National Prescription Database (NorPD) containing information on all drug treatment patients receive, not only from hospitals but also from general practitioners. Data are also linked to Statistics Norway for collecting information about ethnicity, social status and marital status. Development of quality indicators (QI) for diabetes is also an objective of the project, including indicators to measure compliance with guidelines and achievement of treatment goals. The researchers behind the project believe it is important to measure quality and differences in health care in order to improve the prognosis in this patient group