Last week, I had the pleasure of teaching at the National Centre for Rare Diseases hosted by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità and Dr. Domenica Taruscio. This rare disease registry course is in its second year, and is focused on exposing the maintainers of rare disease registries various aspects of registry planning and management. I was very impressed with the specific way in which this course was run. The week started with a discussion of the different types of registries (aims, study design, data sources), management sustainability, and clinical outcomes analysis. This was followed by an innovative collaborative learning exercise in the afternoon, where the participants were broken up into three groups. The collaborative learning focused on positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face interaction, group processing and exercise of small-group interpersonal skills - all skills needed to realize a quality registry resource in addition to simply being a quality ...