Table 6 Comparison of SCDM with International Severe Asthma Registry (ISAR) and Danish National Database for Asthma (DNDA)

Summary

Country

Singapore

International

Netherlands

No. of patients

29,730²

12,764³

 > 300,000

Type of patients

Asthma and COPD, Primary care and specialist care, of all ages

Severe asthma with GINA Step 5, or Step 4 and uncontrolled asthma; 18 years and above only

Asthma patients age 6 and 44 years (excludes COPD)

Aim

To link primary care and tertiary care data

To support health services research, facilitate conduct of pragmatic trials and studies

To aid clinical decision making and inform policy changes in asthma and COPD in Singapore

To generate a centralized severe asthma dataset that would permit data to be shared seamlessly between countries and institutions, to ultimately gain better insight into severe asthma on a global scale

To collect the data on all patients treated for asthma in Denmark and to monitor asthma occurrence, the quality of diagnosis, and management

Strengths and limitations

Strength

Automated data capture

Weekly updates

Broad range of data

Multi-national database

Structured data fields with good data quality

Nation-wide database

Automated data capture

Limitation

Currently limited to two healthcare institutions

Some data captured in free-text requiring additional effort to clean before analysis

Manual method of data entry via an electronic data capture system

Only patients with severe asthma

Only includes patients from 6 to 44 years old

Availability of selected information

Medical history

Yes

Yes

Not stated⁴

Smoking history

Yes

Not stated⁴

Yes

Asthma control

Yes

Yes

Not stated⁴

Lung function test

Yes

Yes

Yes

Asthma medications

Yes

Yes

Yes

Reason for asthma medication switch (if any)

No (but can be mined from free-text medical history)

Yes

Not stated⁴

Non-asthma medication

Yes

Not stated⁴

Not stated⁴

Vaccination

Yes

Not stated⁴

Not stated⁴

Unscheduled visit

Yes

Not stated⁴

Not stated⁴