National Databases for Neurosurgical Outcomes Research: Options, Strengths, and Limitations

BACKGROUND: Quality improvement, value-based care delivery, and personalized patient care depend on robust clinical, financial, and demographic data streams of neurosurgical outcomes. The neurosurgical literature lacks a comprehensive review of large national databases. OBJECTIVE: To assess the strengths and limitations of various resources for outcomes research in neurosurgery. METHODS: A review of the literature was conducted to identify surgical outcomes studies using national data sets. The databases were assessed for the availability of patient demographics and clinical variables, longitudinal follow-up of patients, strengths, and limitations. RESULTS: The number of unique patients contained within each data set ranged from thousands (Quality Outcomes Database [QOD]) to hundreds of millions (MarketScan). Databases with both clinical and financial data included PearlDiver, Premier Healthcare Database, Vizient Clinical Data Base and Resource Manager, and the National Inpatient Sample. Outcomes collected by databases included patient-reported outcomes (QOD); 30-day morbidity, readmissions, and reoperations (National Surgical Quality Improvement Program); and disease incidence and disease-specific survival (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results-Medicare). The strengths of large databases included large numbers of rare pathologies and multi-institutional nationally representative sampling; the limitations of these databases included variable data veracity, variable data completeness, and missing disease-specific variables. CONCLUSION: The improvement of existing large national databases and the establishment of new registries will be crucial to the future of neurosurgical outcomes research.