Since the year 2000 EuroSpine – The Spine Society of Europe has been developing and enhancing a documentation system for spinal surgery in form of a registry. With Spine Tango we are meeting the growing demand to assess the safety and efficacy of all surgical interventions of the spine. Only few other fields in medicine are under comparable scrutiny. Reacting to these tendencies, endeavors of pioneer clinicians and the Spine Tango team, in collaboration with the Institute for Evaluative Research in Medicine of the University of Bern, have led to the implementation of the only international spinal registry to date. The constantly growing number of Spine Tango participants indicates that the system has overcome its development period. Now, having reached a recognized status we would like to encourage national societies and individual partners to join the registry. Health authorities will increasingly limit the accessibility of our treatment modalities if we do not fulfill the demanded standards. Therefore we are offering Spine Tango as a common language to make our services visible and transparent. With a constantly increasing activity in the registry we would like to inform you about its history, its objectives and its current status.
Spine Tango enables you to document the whole spectrum of spinal pathologies and the possible surgical and soon also the non-surgical treatment options. The generic approach of the Spine Tango documentation system is a must to reach the maximum number of participants using a common web based technology. This, in turn, reduces the potential for customizing the Tango in order to meet the individual expectations of specific users. There are, nevertheless, still a number of possibilities to parameterize the data collection processes according to the various hospital workflows in the
user community. To give you the opportunity to document not only the surgical treatment, we have developed Spine Tango Conservative, which is currently being validated. It is due to be released in early 2011.
Spine Tango is an international, non-commercial system under the auspices of EuroSpine aiming to enable national societies to control their own part of the registry. For that a technology called "national module concept" has been implemented to enhance participation options and to provide the hardware structure for appropriate security measures for patient and user privacy
protection. In conclusion, Spine Tango is a unique applied medical and scientific documentation and technology solution. It is to the benefit of patients and physicians whilst generating evidence based findings to improve spinal care.
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