Spine Tango wants to enable Spine Specialists to organize their own outcome research and quality control. In a highly specialized and technology driven discipline like spine surgery, where evidence is lacking for many of the costly treatment options, Spine Specialists and their Professional Societies  as well as health care authorities do increasingly expect proof of quality, effectiveness and safety of what is done to the patient. With Spine Tango, the Spine Specialist has instruments at hand to systematically collect data about his therapeutic activities and their results, can conduct or strengthen own research and compare his performance against the anonymized international data pool. This process is known as benchmarking.  Benchmarking is the process of comparing the cost, time or quality of what one organization does against what other similar organizations do. The result can initiate changes in order to make improvements.

In the first place Spine Tango serves spine surgeons and their patients. It is intended to involve both parties in research and quality control by collecting, consolidating and analyzing what spine surgeons do and what effect their treatments have on patient’s lives.

In the second place, the Spine Tango network is an ideal instrument and platform for evaluating the safety and effectiveness of new techniques and technologies. It becomes clear that a close collaboration with industry partners whose products make up an important part of many therapies in the spine field is desired. Such collaboration can be realized with e.g. specific studies which can piggy bag on the ongoing data collection, or with product specific outcome evaluations in the EuroSpine data pool.

Next: HTA