Widespread data collection for spine surgeons in Michigan has helped the quality of patient care and has provided valuable data to researchers.
The Michigan Spine Surgery Improvement Collaborative operates statewide and works with practices that perform at least 200 spine surgeries annually, Mick Perez-Cruet, MD, told Becker's. Abstractors collect and review data — something that isn't always done due to time and costs for offices.
The data from this has helped Dr. Perez-Cruet's practice improve different areas of patient care.
"When we first started to do this collaborative, [urinary retention rates] were about 18%. We then looked at sites which had a much lower retention rate and found that early ambulation was one of the key variables to reducing urinary retention. We've also gone away from keeping Foley catheters in after surgery. We used to do bladder scans on everybody, but found that the bladder scan data would often make us put in Foleys when they weren't really needed."
With those efforts, the urinary retention rates fell to 4%.
"These are really important variables because something like urinary retention can increase a lot of cost per care," he said. "We also look at surgical site infection rates — another thing that also improved markedly with early ambulation, and we never would have been able to recognize a lot of these problems had we not really driven into the details and collected these outcome measures."
MSSIC's data covers more than 100,000 patients and has supported publications in leading journals including Neurosurgery and the Spine Journal. Dr. Perez-Cruet said the peer-reviewed data and large sample size can decrease biases in smaller studies.
Other spine and orthopedic organizations have their own patient data initiatives, and neurosurgeons in Illinois have sho
"Expanding nationally hinges on securing resources like grants or insurance coverage for Abstractors. Blue Cross Blue Shield supports us in Michigan, but similar funding would be essential elsewhere. Demonstrating savings to Medicare and Medicaid could encourage federal support for scaling this model."