Karen K. Briggs, M.B.A., M.P.H., Director of Clinical Research

Marilee P. Horan, M.P.H., Research Associate

Lauren M. Matheny, B.A., Research Associate

Kira Chaney Barclay M.P.H., Clinical Research Associate

Chris Pizzo B.S., Clinical Research Assistant

Clinical Research Interns

Current Projects

Current Publications

Clinical Research Awards

Introduction

This year the demand for healthcare reform became a major issue. One of the basics of reform includes outcome-based patient care. This concept focuses on how the patient does following surgery. If every doctor kept track of how their patients do following surgery, then patients would then know what to expect from a surgery. This would allow for patients to make informed decisions and improve satisfaction with healthcare. Ask your doctor how many of the surgeries has he/she done and what is the outcome of those patients. This would also help with the cost of healthcare. The goal would be to find the doctor that has the least failures and/or complications. The fewer failures that require a subsequent surgery and the fewer complications, the less money spent on healthcare. The Clinic has been practicing the model for years. For more than 20 years, Clinical Research has been defining patient outcomes in sports medicine. Over the years we have gone from just knee and shoulder to the addition of hip and spine. We are looking forward to adding ankle in 2009.

Dr. Steadman saw the need for the documentation of patient outcomes and now we have over 15 years of data. Clinical Research leads the way in documentation and collection of outcome data. We also use the data to publish patient outcomes and can answer when the patients ask, “How many of these surgeries have you done and how did they do?” Our clinical research database continues to be productive. We have increased the number of publications over last year, with 2008 being the most productive we have ever had. We are currently following over 17,000 knees, with 10,000 of these knees more than 10 years after their surgery. We also are tracking outcomes on 2,000 hip arthroscopies, which may be one of the largest series of consecutive cases with documented surgical details. Our shoulder database continues to grow, with nearly 5,000 shoulder surgeries, as does our spine database with nearly 1,000 spine surgeries. We look forward to the future of outcomes-based patient care, which has been practiced here for many years. The following studies are a few examples of the research we have conducted in 2008. All of these studies help contribute to outcome-based health care.

Knee Research

Shoulder Research

Hip Research

Spine Research