Stakeholder leadership is essential for supporting the successful implementation of a client registry. Effective leaders should be identified and join together to form a stakeholder leadership group (SLG) for the development and implementation of a Client Registry. The SLG should be the authority under which the Client Registry operates and accepts responsibility to define scope, vet and prioritize use cases/user stories, and ensure agreement on the data specifications used in the Client Registry.

A client registry should be responsive to users’ needs and the local context. User stories and data specifications are two ways to describe: “What will the client registry achieve and How should it operate?” A primary objective of this guide is to promote and facilitate a country driven and user requirements based process. The ideal solution will be responsive to users’ needs and their context.

Using the draft specifications and user stories developed in Step 3 as a foundation to move forward, the next step is to determine resources and develop the project plan to support the implementation process of the client registry. This step will include selection of software, determining hardware needs, defining the patient matching algorithm (for specified use case), and validation/testing.

It should be expected that requirements and requests for the registry data feeds will evolve over time. For this reason support strategies should be developed and should remain in place to triage requests for data, system enhancements, integrations, operations support or general troubleshooting among users.

Post production, it is important to capture lessons learned. Once the system is running and stabilized, the iterative development process can begin again with an expanded scope. New interfaces, user stories or workflows may need to be added.