EPRD Annual Report 2021

The EPRD continues to make good progress: although many procedures were cancelled or postponed last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the hospitals submitted documents for almost 290,000 procedures to the registry in 2020 alone. So, even when times are difficult, hospital commitment continues.

Nevertheless, the arthroplasty sector in Germany and the EPRD did not come through the COVID-19 crisis unscathed: its effects are addressed in chapters 2 and 4 which focus on the latest developments and the surgical documentation registered for the calendar year 2020.

As in previous years, the main focus of this annual report is on arthroplasty survival outcomes, which are presented in Chapter 5. The insights gained from the analysis of arthroplasty survival data can help improve quality. This year, we specifically focus on revision surgery due to periprosthetic joint infection. Infections are a particularly serious reason for revision surgery because they also markedly increase the risk of subsequent reoperations. Section 5.4 examines the general risk of periprosthetic joint infections and the factors that modulate this risk.

Chapter 6 addresses another option to implement quality improvements and increase patient safety in a simple and straightforward manner. In rare cases, incompatible components are implanted together during primary surgery. In these cases, it is often foreseeable that the patients will suffer problems with these implants. In order to prevent these avoidable “mismatches” in future primary surgery, the EPRD will establish a system which will report these cases back to the hospitals at an early stage.

The 2021 Annual Report is available to download here.