Data collection for the ELSO registry shouldn’t take hours per patient. Here’s how the right clinical management system can transform your ECMO workflow.
If your ECMO team is still relying on manual data entry, colour-coded spreadsheets, and a two-person verification system to submit cases to the ELSO registry, you’re not alone. A recent ELSO webinar revealed that 93% of centres are manually entering registry data, with most spending two to three hours per ECMO run on data collection alone. Some centres reported even seven or more hours per case.
For hospitals managing increasing caseloads with limited abstraction staff - 70% of ECMO centres have only one or two people handling data submission. This is not only an administrative burden, but also a patient safety concern, a quality improvement bottleneck and an unsustainable drain on highly trained clinical professionals.
The question isn’t whether your ECMO team needs a better data management approach. It’s what that approach should look like.
The Hidden Cost of Manual ECMO Data Collection
The ELSO registry is hugely valuable. It spans 65 countries and hundreds of thousands of patient records, helping centres improve care, support research and shape new benchmarking models.
But the process of feeding the registry is still heavy work. A specialist pulls data from multiple systems, checks every field definition, enters it manually and then someone else verifies it. When ELSO updates its definitions every few months, the whole process must be adjusted again.
This creates backlogs. Data quality drops when staff are tired or rushed. Quality improvement slows because teams can’t easily use their own data. Hence, insights that could improve outcomes stay locked in spreadsheets instead of being used at the bedside.
Why Generic Solutions Fall Short
Some hospitals have tried to build their way out of the problem. Some spend years developing a custom ECMO charting application with their IT department whereas others build an internal database with converters for bulk uploads. These solutions work but both require time, funding and dedicated IT support for ongoing maintenance which are never easy to achieve at most hospitals.
Third‑party abstraction services are another option, but they bring their own challenges. Staff need specialist ECMO training, costs can vary widely and the work is still manual because someone is still extracting and entering the data.
The ECMO community has also learned hard lessons with vendors who promised automation but delivered little. Many centres invested heavily only to automate a small part of the ELSO form, leaving staff to finish the rest by hand.
What a Purpose-Built Clinical Management System Should Deliver
The most effective approach isn’t a bolt-on tool or a workaround; it’s a clinical management system purpose-built for the ECMO workflow. Here’s what that should look like in practice.
✔Integration to reduce duplication
The system should pull patient data directly from your hospital systems. This isn’t just about reducing data entry by a percentage; it’s also about fundamentally changing the workflow so that validated data flows automatically from its source into the fields the ELSO registry requires.
✔ Built-in ELSO validation
Real-time data validation against ELSO’s field definitions catches errors at the point of entry, not weeks later during a retrospective audit. When ELSO updates its definitions, the system should adapt without requiring time for your IT team to rebuild custom configurations.
✔ Analytics that make your data actionable
Submitting data to ELSO is just the beginning. The real value comes from using that data in your own centre. A good system should give you clear dashboards showing survival, complications, length of stay, and other key measures in real time and let you compare outcomes across treatments, subgroups, and even other centres.
✔ Research-ready infrastructure
Many hospitals participate in clinical trials or conduct local research. A system that supports screening, enrolment tracking and real-time outcome monitoring across control and treatment groups removes a significant barrier to research participation.
✔ Customisation without complexity
Every ECMO program has local reporting requirements beyond what ELSO mandates. The system should accommodate custom workflows and data points without requiring a development project for each new need.
Medicus ECMO: Built for Critical Care, Proven at Scale
Mela Solutions’ Medicus ECMO software has been designed specifically to automate the collection, validation and analysis of data aligned to the ELSO dataset, integrating directly with hospital systems to minimise the manual effort that consumes so much of an ECMO team’s time.
What sets Medicus apart is the depth of its clinical intelligence layer. Rather than simply digitising the data entry process, it transforms ECMO data into clear, actionable insights through embedded analytics dashboards. Clinical teams can search and filter across their full dataset, drill into monthly trends and confidence intervals for key quality indicators and generate instant reports that provide clear evidence for quality improvement initiatives.
Medicus is already trusted by over 93% of acute NHS hospitals in the United Kingdom. The platform is supporting critical care teams across more than 250 sites in 7different countries. This scale of adoption reflects something important: the system works in real clinical environments, with real integration challenges, under real time pressures.
For ECMO centres evaluating their data management options, Medicus offers a proven, purpose-built automated alternative to the patchwork of spreadsheets, that most programs currently rely on. Whilst Medicus handles the data burden, you can focus on what matters most: patient outcomes.
Interested in seeing how Medicus ECMO could work for you?
Contact Mela Solutions to set up a personalised demo experience.
