Anne Regierer is head of the new group Registry Research in Rheumatology

Since 1 January 2024, PD. Anne Constanze Regierer, MD, has headed the new Registry Research in Rheumatology Research Group in the Epidemiology programme area at the German Rheumatism Research Centre Berlin (DRFZ), a Leibniz Institute.

As head of the new research group, the healthcare researcher would like to further develop and optimise the current medical registries and, if necessary, establish new ones. Medical registries collect prospective and standardised data from patients. In addition to clinical studies, medical registries are important tools for researching new therapies and for improving and reviewing established treatment procedures.

“Our vision is to link the structured data from the registers with other data sources such as health insurance data or data from electronic patient records and thus make a direct contribution to better medical care for patients with rheumatic diseases,” explains the new group leader.

For the past year, Anne Regierer has been the spokesperson for the registry working group within the Technology and Methods Platform for Networked Medical Research (TMF). Moreover, she has also set up the Germany-wide disease registry RABBIT-SpA, in which patients with axial spondyloarthritis and psoriatic arthritis are documented. The data is collected digitally by rheumatologists and patients. In addition to questions about the safety and effectiveness of therapies, topics such as mental health or ability to work can also be analysed. One major success of Anne Regierer and her colleagues has been the data protection-compliant integration of a medical smartphone app into the registry. This means that patient data can be generated at a higher frequency in addition to the registry questionnaires. Imaging files can now also be uploaded to the registry for centralised and blinded analysis. Here too, the combination of different data sources means great added value for research. The further development of medical registers offers great opportunities to use everyday health data to improve medical care.

Anne Regierer habilitated in 2015 with the topic “Clinical care research in breast cancer”, during which time was performing research, alongside her clinical duties in the Medical Clinic for Oncology and Haematology at Charité. Since then, she has been a Privatdozentin at Charité. The epidemiologist has been working at the DRFZ for nine years and has been deputy group leader of Anja Strangfeld’s Pharmacoepidemiology research group since 2016.