AAOS Registry Program Blog

This article first appeared in the February issue of AAOS Now, the monthly news magazine of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS). 

For the AAOS Registry Program, 2021 was a year of significant expansion and noteworthy achievements, as it continued its growth trajectory and introduced several new visual and analytical enhancements.

“AAOS registries have grown and matured considerably over the past four years,” said AAOS Registry Oversight Committee Chair William J. Maloney, MD, FAAOS. “With more than 2.5 million procedures collected from five registries, the AAOS Registry Program has made large strides toward its mission to improve orthopaedic care through the collection, analysis, and reporting of actionable data.”

This article first appeared in the January issue of AAOS Now, the monthly news magazine of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS).

2020 was a year like no other, with the healthcare system completely upended along with the rest of society by COVID-19. But for the AAOS Registry Program, it was nonetheless a year of growth and accomplishment.

The OrthoForum, a nationwide network of privately owned orthopaedic practices known for its pillars of benchmarking, networking, innovation and advocacy, announced a collaboration with the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), naming the AAOS Registry Program as the organization’s recommended registries for its members. The four registries include the American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR), the Shoulder & Elbow Registry, the Musculoskeletal Tumor Registry, and the American Spine Registry, which is a collaboration with the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and AAOS. All of the AAOS registries support the OrthoForum’s mission of providing orthopaedic group practices with access to the latest best practices and benchmarking tools needed to advance their local market presence.

The article below will be featured in the August 2020 issue of AAOS Now, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) monthly news magazine. 

The Academy’s Registry Program celebrated a major marker of progress in June when the American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR), the cornerstone of AAOS’ Registry Program, reached and surpassed its two millionth hip and knee procedure with the input of data from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Having tracked an additional one million procedures since 2017 to reach this milestone, the Registry Program gives orthopaedic surgeons and providers the most comprehensive picture to date of trends of hip and knee arthroplasty practice and outcomes in the United States.

The AAOS Registry Program is now collecting COVID-19 data through the capture of the ICD-10 code for COVID-19 confirmed diagnosis, U07.1. The new code is enabled across each of the AAOS registries, including the American Joint Replacement Registry, the world's largest national registry of hip and knee joint replacement data by annual procedural count; the Shoulder & Elbow Registry; the Musculoskeletal Tumor Registry, and the American Spine Registry, a collaborative effort between the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and the AAOS.

Surgeons Can Now Compare Their Own Procedure Data Against National Registry Benchmarks

The mission of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Registry Program is to improve orthopaedic care through the collection, analysis, and reporting of actionable data contributed by hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, and orthopaedic practices across the United States. With the recent introduction of Surgeon Dashboards, the Registry Program has added a new quality improvement resource available to individual AAOS surgeon members.

This new member benefit allows surgeons, whose sites participate in an AAOS Registry, to compare their individual data against national de-identified information and benchmarks. The Surgeon Dashboards, enabled by an enhancement to the AAOS RegistryInsights^® platform, can display procedural, post-operative, and patient-reported outcomes (PRO) data. Surgeon Dashboards are available at no additional cost to participating sites’ surgeons who are AAOS members.

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) RegistryInsights™ provides users with an overview of their submitted procedures and of the registry as a whole. From the homepage, users can navigate to the American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR) and new Shoulder & Elbow Registry, the musculoskeletal tumor pilot, and other offerings as they become available.

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of AAOS Now, the AAOS' monthly news magazine.

It’s been a year of milestones and trailblazing accomplishments for the AAOS Registry Program. In its 2018 Annual Report, having completed its reintegration within AAOS, the AJRR tallied 1,186,955 procedures from 1,067 institutions from 2012 to 2017, establishing the AJRR as the largest orthopaedic registry by annual procedure count.

"Registries are tools to help the medical profession collect data, report, and benchmark to define patient-centered quality care to identify potential procedural or implant problems before they become widespread public health issues," said AAOS President David A. Halsey, MD. "Other national joint replacement registries such as the Swedish Hip Arthroplasty Register have proven that monitoring survivorship can reduce revision rates. That translates into reducing direct medical costs and, more importantly, improving patient care and quality of life."

August is National Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC) Month and the American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR) has invited Alex Taira, Policy Analyst, Ambulatory Surgery Center Association (ASCA), to contribute a guest blog on the evolution and diversity of today’s orthopaedic surgery sites. It has always been the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ (AAOS) belief that choosing the appropriate orthopaedic surgery setting is a decision that the patient and the surgeon make together based on a series of factors that lead to the best patient experience and outcome. Today’s patient options include hospitals, hospital-sponsored ASCs, and independent ASCs.

Over 1,000 U.S. hospitals and 68 ASCs participate in AJRR. Based on the number of procedures submitted monthly, AJRR is the largest orthopaedic registry in the world. The AJRR database holds 1.3 million hip and knee arthroplasty procedures from over 8,000 surgeons practicing in one or more types of clinical settings. As more total joint arthroplasties (TJAs) are performed in ASCs, reducing variation and demonstrating quality of care delivered can be accomplished through Registry participation.

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) and the Virginia Joint Registry (VJR) have entered into a collaborative relationship enabling VJR participants to continue their registry quality initiatives through the American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR). Virginia Joint Registry board member William Jiranek, MD, said, “The VJR believes that the expanded scope and resources of AJRR will lead to conclusions that will benefit patients beyond the analysis and findings of a single state registry. For example, it will add new capabilities such as national benchmarking.”

The number of hip and knee replacement procedures by state in the American Joint Replacement Registry.

David G. Lewallen, MD, Medical Director, American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR), was a featured speaker at the University of Michigan's (UM) "Larry S. Matthews, MD, Adult Lower Extremity Joint Reconstruction Lectureship" on May 18, 2018. He shared portions of AJRR’s development roadmap with his audience, including collaborative possibilities between AJRR and state-based registries.

“As a national registry, AJRR already has a strong presence among its international counterparts. At home, it has successfully collaborated with several state registries under different models. Now, as a part of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Registry Program, with access to additional resources, AJRR’s ability to reach out to the states has increased. We are open to exploring opportunities with state registries that share the AJRR mission to improve orthopaedic care through the collection, analysis, and reporting of actionable data,” Dr. Lewallen stated.

This week’s blog shares two examples of AJRR and state registry cooperation. We conclude with a more comprehensive summary of other current AJRR opportunities mentioned in Dr. Lewallen’s UM presentation.