Introduction Electronic trauma registries (ETR) play a critical role in the collection of pre-hospital and hospital based trauma data, required for trauma care improvement. The crucial step is to have a functionally active and reliable trauma registry which is customised according to the local needs. This prompted for development of a low cost local registry with the help of software programmers.

Objectives To pretest locally developed ETR at a single university hospital, to assess the functionality, efficiency and reliability in data storage retrieval and analysis.

Methods We tested the registry with records of poly-trauma patients treated during 2008 at Aga Khan University Hospital. This data was entered into the ETR, by trained staff, its functionality and reliability was assessed through analysis of the data.

Results There were 119 patients, with mean age of 32.7 years, mean RTS was 7.48650, ISS score was 12.039 and mean TRISS was 95.7511. The most common mechanism of injury was MVC (73.1%) followed by gunshot wounds (16.8%). There were 5 (4.2%) patients who expired. In the analysis of injuries, head and neck (42%) and extremities (52.1%) were the most commonly involved regions. We found that there were four unexpected deaths (TRISS > 50%) and we also found two unexpected survivors (TRISS <50%).

Conclusion The ETR is found to be a reliable data storage system which is also capable of generating standard reports consisting of patient demographics, injury severity scores and probability of survival and outcome.