The Registries and multicentric studies committee aims to :
- continue to advocate the importance of national joint registries
- encourage national and international multicentric studies
- facilitate the set up of both with the ultimate goal to improve medical care
Multicentric Studies
Multicentric studies are research projects conducted across multiple hospitals, regions, or countries, involving surgeons and institutions from diverse healthcare systems.
As the reference European scientific society for shoulder and elbow surgery, SECEC aims to provide European researchers with various initiatives around multicentric studies. These aim to help produce robust, widely applicable evidence that improves surgical care and accelerates the safe adoption of innovations:
- a general template for multicentric studies, available to all researchers, to help structure and launch their own projects
- the SECEC-official multicentric studies are research projects designed and driven directly by SECEC itself, with the society managing recruitment, tools, and data centrally. 3 of them are currently ongoing:
- PJI (Prosthetic Shoulder Infections) study, running since 2024
- Mason type 2 fracture study
- Periprosthetic fractures of the upper limb retrospective study
- the SECEC-supported multicentric studies are independent projects led by external investigators that SECEC reviews and backs with its network, templates, and resources, without originating or running the study itself. Currently two of them are under approval.
Current challenges of registries
Nowadays a shoulder registry exists in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia.
Existing registries report on surgeon-derived measures, as key-outcome is revision, but there is an increasing demand of all stakeholders for more patient focused outcome measurements. Ideally registries should relate to patient derived outcome measurements as PROMs to enable us to analyze clinical outcome. In several countries the PROMs are already linked to the registry.
Comparative analysis of national registries is difficult as there is a difference in the parameters and outcome measurements recorded. Merging data from different national registries into a common database would enable us to compare incidence, indication, procedure, but also results, and the higher number of cases in such a database would improve the statistical strength of studies. However, this can only be obtained if we agree to use a similar set of variables and outcome measurements.