Quality control, outcomes research, postmarket surveillance of implants, national and international study network

Internal quality control: assuming that you have a complete data collection Spine Tango enables you to monitor all types of surgery during a specific period, observing the date and duration of operation, patient characteristics and outcomes (patient and physician based).

External quality control: Benchmarking, the comparison of own performance with that of the national or international results in the Tango is a powerful management tool because it overcomes "paradigm blindness." Paradigm blindness can be summed up as the mode of thinking, "The way we do it is the best because this is the way we've always done it." Benchmarking opens organizations to new methods, ideas and tools to improve their effectiveness. It helps overcome resistance to change by presenting successful methods of problem solving that are different to the ones currently employed. Enabling benchmarking possibilities is one of the fundamental goals of the Spine Tango venture.

Outcomes research: this aspect is actually just taking a different view for the same basic activity, i.e. the systematic and prospective collection of key data regarding interventions and outcomes for and of spinal pathologies. While quality assurance is rather used for the purposes of improving ones` own standards of care, outcomes research wants to generate new medical and scientific knowledge and make it available in the peer-reviewed literature.

Postmarket surveillance of implants: implants play a major role in modern spine surgery and just like in the domains of total joint arthroplasty their true performance can only be evaluated by systematically following the devices after implantation and documenting their outcomes in large clinical databases like the Tango.

National and international study network: the Tango is a technology backbone and currently networks over 40 active hospitals in Europe, North and South America, Australia and Asia. This provides a great opportunity for national and international multicenter studies that piggyback on the ongoing routine data collection, add some hypothesis based questions and collect this extra information for the time of primary and followup data collection as specified in the joint study protocol.

Next: Who can benefit from the Spine Tango registry?