Journal de colonne vertébrale et de neurochirurgie

Future Directions in Spine: An Opportunity to Accelerate Quality Improvement

Neil R. Malhotra, Robert Whitmore, Lachlan J. Smith, William Welch, James Schuster, Paul Marcotte, Stephen Dante, Vincent Arlet, Steven Brem and Sean Grady M

Future Directions in Spine: An Opportunity to Accelerate Quality Improvement

Surgical spinal intervention has never been more advanced. However, the objective evidence for intervention has never been more assailed. To definitively answer critical questions about spinal interventions, a system that records data for every clinical encounter, in perpetuity, is needed. The data on each patient encounter needs to be organized to permit easy search and analysis thus permitting, for the first time, continuous quality improvement and hypothesis driven research.