Results Matter
Clinical Research & Data Collection
There is some misleading information in medical marketing today – terms like “minimally invasive,” “low complications,” “laser surgery”, and “best results” have become buzz words and are being used without substantial supporting evidence.
Our goal at Georgia Spine and Neurosurgery Center is to provide you, the patient, with accurate and pertinent information to assist in making the best decision for your medical care. As a result, we have built a patient database which contains information on outcomes for all elective spine surgery patients since our practice opened in 2003.
Why do we collect data?
- We believe patients have a right to know their surgeon’s “track record” and the success rates of different medical procedures
- Allows our surgeons and clinicians to objectively evaluate and monitor the quality of care they provide
- To better indentify the best course of treatment for individual patients, as well as patient subgroups
- Provides the foundation of clinical research, which enables us to assess new surgical techniques and emerging technologies
What is unique about our patient database?
- We do not selectively enroll patients with greater improvements and omit patients with less improvement. Every patient that has an elective spine procedure in our practice is enrolled in the database and included for analysis
How is our data collected?
- All investigators obtain the appropriate research credentials, including CITI certification and Good Clinical Practices training, all of which are renewed yearly
- Patients are de-identified (personal information is removed) upon entering the database and assigned a unique ID number
- All data is stored securely with a third-party expert data management company or locally on a secure server.
- The majority of information is collected through meticulous retrospective review of patient charts, progress notes, and surgical summaries
- Clinical outcomes are prospectively collected using a set of questionnaires that has been identified by academic literature to provide the most comprehensive picture of patient outcomes
- Our earlier review showed that between the clinicians and researchers, an average of 625 minutes (10.5 hours) were spent for each patient on data collection alone from their pre-operative appointment to their 2-year post-operative appointment.
Outcomes & Results
