Record care systematically – increase patient safety

Artificial joint replacement has been a great success story of modern medicine, especially of orthopaedics. The insertion of more than 400,000 hip and knee implants every year is one of the most common surgical procedures performed in Germany. At the same time, almost 45,000 revisions are required each year. At the time being, little is known about the reasons.

The German Arthroplasty Registry (EPRD) has been established to ensure and improve the quality of endoprosthetic surgery and thereby increase patient safety. The EPRD's extensive data pool will make it easier than ever to identify causes of failure in endoprosthetic interventions in future. By this, it will be easier to sort out whether the implants used, the surgical procedure and/or patient-specific features are responsible for a revision.

EPRD is a voluntary offer – also for patients. Patients are informed about the data collection process and the purpose and objective of the EPRD during the pre-surgery consultation. Only if the patients agree and sign a declaration of consent, data on the implant and the procedure will be recorded and transmitted to the EPRD´s core registry database (using pseudonyms*). Participation in the EPRD is free of charge for patients.

*During pseudonymisation, the name or other identifying feature is replaced by a pseudonym (usually a multi-digit combination of letters or numbers, also known as a code) in order to exclude or significantly complicate the identification of the patient.

Data protection is guaranteed

EPRD puts a strong focus on data protection. Only encrypted (pseudonymised) data are stored, which are also only forwarded via a trust center which is run by an external independent company. Neither EPRD gGmbH nor the core registry database do receive personal data with would allow identification of individual patients.

Only the participating health insurance companies and the participating hospitals – but not the EPRD – are able to decode the merged data in exceptional cases. This is only allowed if there would be benefits for patients: for example, if built-in implants turn out to be defective. Health insurance companies or participating hospitals then inform those patients who have also been treated with these implants in question and, if necessary, check their functional condition. In this way, countermeasures can be taken at an early stage and further health complaints or additional hospital stays can be potentially avoided..