The creation of the American Spine Registry™ (ASR) was announced in September 2019 as a collaboration between the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS). The registry went live in March 2020. The ASR was built on the Quality Outcomes Database (QOD) Spine registry.
In July 2020, the registry announced its first industry sponsor, NuVasive, Inc. The company will contribute to future development of the registry, which allows surgeons and participating sites to track clinical and patient-reported outcomes. With an industry sponsor the registry will be able to grow, allowing greater access for spine surgeons to track their outcomes and for hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to reuse registry data to improve patient care.
Dr. Anthony Asher, president of the Neuroscience Institute at Atrium Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, AANS officer and ASR executive committee co-chair said, “With NuVasive leading the way in support of this mission, this sponsorship will help ASR to effectively influence the future of spine care for the more than 1.2 million spine surgeries that are performed nationally each year. We look forward to the lasting impact it will have on our program.”
Vice President of Clinical, Medical, and Regulatory Affairs at NuVasive, Kyle Malone, spoke highly of the registry: “Led by two highly regarded surgical societies, the ASR extends benefits of systematic data collection nationwide to improve evidence-based decision making in spine.”
The ASR has a long way to go to catch up with other orthopedic registries, such as the American Joint Replacement Registry, another AAOS project, which recently celebrated its 10th year and 2 millionth knee and hip replacement entry.
Participants in the ASR are offered either a standard or vanguard depending on the amount of data supplied by a participating site. Separate lumbar and cervical modules are available, as well. Personalized dashboards allow surgeons to see their individual data compared against national benchmarks.
