CORR Insights®: Collection and Reporting of Patient-reported Outcome Measures in Arthroplasty Registries: Multinational Survey and Recommendations

Patient-reported outcomes measures (PROMs) help characterize patients’ disease experiences before surgery as well as any improvement or worsening that may occur afterward. One of the most widely used PROMs for patients with lower extremity arthritis, the WOMAC, queries the patient on 24 items, divided into five questions about pain, two about stiffness, and 17 on physical function [³]. The answers to these questions inform the stated goal of the Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry (AOANJRR) (and all other registries), which is to obtain “… quality data that can be used to inform beneficial change” [²].

In the study by Bohm et al. [⁴] in this issue of Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research®, the authors reported in a survey study on the collection of PROMs by current member registries of the International Society of Arthroplasty Registries (ISAR), and found that only 41% (16/39) of member registries obtained PROMs. Of these 16 member registries, there was a reasonable level of uniformity in the patient data collected (age, sex, BMI, primary and revision indication, ASA class).

The important message here is that the current data collection is neither uniform nor complete across the world’s registries [^{1, 2, 6, 7}]. The collection of demographic data in the AOANJRR, for example, is still relatively new, as ASA class was first collected in 2012, and BMI in 2015 [²]. The practical results of these findings suggest a possible impact on the validity of the data. The long-term result may be an inability to compare within a country, or perhaps at some point internationally, the outcome of a defined procedure (THA in a patient of a certain age, gender, BMI). The more we know about where better outcomes are being obtained and the reasons for this, the better we can guide patient improvement.