AJRR selects Remedy Informatics to build national hip and knee replacement registry

The American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR) has selected Remedy Informatics, the leading provider of registries for Life Science, to build a registry to collect data on all primary and revision total joint replacement procedures in the United States. Representatives from AJRR and Remedy Informatics will unveil the new registry at the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, Feb. 7 – Feb. 11.

"We are excited to announce that the registry is going live," said David Lewallen, MD, an orthopedic surgeon from Mayo Clinic who chairs the AJRR board of directors. "We have a very aggressive timetable for the registry and with the technology in place we are ready to begin the process of gathering the information we need to improve joint replacement outcomes."

Based on Remedy Informatics' Mosaic™ Platform, the AJRR registry will efficiently gather data from participating hospitals and leading orthopedic surgeons across the United Sates and enable AJRR to analyze that data using powerful pattern recognition tools to further efforts to optimize patient outcomes and reduce the cost of care.

AJRR recently completed a one-year pilot project collecting data on joint replacement outcomes from nine participating hospitals, which contributed data on more than 18,000 procedures. With successful completion of this pilot registry, AJRR has proven the concept of a centralized national hip and knee replacement registry and identified key lessons learned.

"We are now ready to move on the next phase and expand the registry," said Lewallen. "Our goal is to recruit 90 percent of hospitals across the United States to participate in the registry by the end of 2015."

One of the key challenges AJRR identified in the pilot was finding registry technology that would enable efficient submission of data by participating hospitals. "Finding the Remedy Informatics' registry software was crucial to our ability to address the data collection challenges we encountered during our pilot program," said Randolph Meinzer, director of information technology for AJRR. "The software enables automated submission of data from existing orthopedic registries and interfacing with the electronic medical record and other IT systems of our member hospitals. Low volume hospitals can also enter data on a case-by-case basis using simple web-based forms. We believe these capabilities will minimize the data entry burden for participating hospitals and help accelerate our recruiting efforts."

Another key challenge identified by AJRR was the need to ensure that the data, collected from numerous institutions across the country, is semantically consistent and structured for complex queries and analytics. "Ensuring consistent, quality data was essential to our project and the Mosaic Platform's ontology made that possible. We look forward to sharing the insights we gain on patterns in joint replacement procedures by using the data visualization and query tools available within the registry," said Lewallen.

"We have been very pleased with the Remedy Informatics implementation process," said Meinzer.  "The Level 1 data development cycle, from requirements definition to an operational registry, was completed in a matter of a few months.  We are already working on Level II and Level III data and I am convinced that we will see the goals of the AJRR Project realized with greater success because we are building on such a solid foundation."

The registry is now live and ready to capture Level I data, which includes patient data (name, sex, date of birth, social security number and ICD-9 code for diagnosis), surgeon data (name and number of surgeries performed), procedure data (ICD-9 code for type of surgery, date of surgery, patient age at surgery, laterality and implant), and hospital name (name, address and number of surgeries performed).

Over time the registry will contain levels one through four of data, representing a very complete and detailed picture of joint and hip replacement surgeries in the United States.

"We are pleased to support the AJRR effort," said Gary Kennedy, CEO and founder of Remedy Informatics. "We believe this is an extremely important initiative and will vastly improve patient outcomes in hip and joint replacements. I'm thrilled that our Mosaic Platform will enable AJRR and its participating hospitals to make many significant discoveries."