Over 1.5 Million Arthroplasty Procedures in AJRR Database

The American Joint Replacement Registry (AJRR), managed by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), has released its 2019 Annual Report on hip and knee arthroplasty patient outcomes. The report, now in its sixth year, includes data from 1,525,435 hip and knee arthroplasty procedures performed between 2012 and 2018.

James A. Browne, M.D., chair of the AJRR Publications Committee and editor of AJRR Publications said, “Highlights in this annual report include new analysis of timely topics including dual mobility hip bearings and cementless fixation in total knee arthroplasty, exploration of the impact of patient comorbidities including smoking, and more sophisticated survivorship analyses with adjustment for age and sex, along with other findings.”

This year’s AJRR Annual Report showcases new or enhanced Registry capabilities and offerings including:

• Increased tracking and monitoring of patient outcomes with longitudinal patient information through the expansion of the Registry analytics platform, RegistryInsights®. Now, participating hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, and individual surgeons have the ability to view their respective dashboards displaying their data compared to the AJRR national benchmark.
• Enhanced capture of patient-reported outcome measures through continued support of the RegistryInsights® PROM platform and partnerships with third party vendors with the expanded Authorized Vendor Program.
• Additional opportunities for sites to track performance measurements and use Registry data in national quality improvement (QI) programs.
• Peer-reviewed publications and presentations based on AJRR Registry data.

Dr. Browne told OTW, “Patient comorbidities are well known to influence the outcome and survivorship of hip and knee arthroplasty. With this year’s annual report, we decided to begin to explore how patient comorbidities influence the registry data by looking at one specific comorbidity that is potentially modifiable—smoking. An association was seen between current or former smoking and decreased survivorship of both primary total hip and knee arthroplasty.”

Asked how much more sophisticated the survivorship analyses are, he told OTW, “We first published survivorship curves last year. This year’s report builds on this initial work and refines the methodology we use to calculate the curves by adjusting for patient age and sex. This is an iterative process and we plan to continue to critically evaluate how we present the data. Readers should expect the level of sophistication to continue to increase as the AJRR grows and matures.”

To read and download the complete 2019 report, visit the AJRR website.