Globally, the neonatal morbidity and mortality rate is reported to be 19 per 1000 live birth. This rate, however, in our country Iran was estimated to be 9.6 in 2016. This indicates that 12731 infants died in 2016. It is needless to say that, there has not been a considerable decline in the infant mortality rate in our country.
Neonatal care and management is an important area of medicine, as a result submission of infant records on the one hand and the reliability and accuracy of the data on the other is of utmost importance to neonatologists and researchers in order to further improve neonatal care and management and moreover to stimulate and facilitate research especially on critically ill neonates. Due to the high importance of this matter, the World Health Organization mandated all countries to establish registry system for the collection and submission of infant records in their country by 2015.
As a result, majority of developed countries are either equipped with an electronic registry system or are linked to Vermont Oxford Network Databases. In Iran, Maternal, Fetal, and Neonatal Research Center launched the Neonatal Electronic Registry System in Vali-asr Hospital in Imam Khomeini Hospital Complex in Tehran which has proven to accelerate and facilitate the collecting data of all neonates admitted at Neonatal Intensive Care Units and which ensures the accuracy of the data submitted to the databases.
This electronic data entry program includes a list of predefined data designed by neonatologists from Maternal, Fetal, and Neonatal Research Center in association with the Neonatal Intensive Care Units. This doctor-based data entry not only allows for the collection, error checking, and submission of infant records, but also offers advanced statistical analyses through SPSS software.