Practical issues of the national arthroplasty registry in Slovenia

Background: Medical institutions that perform total hip arthroplasties have reached a preliminary agreement to implement the National Arthroplasty Registry in Slovenia (RETEPS) and representatives of different hospitals have founded a project group to facilitate the implementation. Currently there are four hospitals in Slovenia where a standardized questionnaire is used to record the data on total hip arthroplasties but the analysis of the collected data has not yet been performed on the national level. The problem of unifying the collected data, the logistical problems of data analysis, reliable identification of patients in the registry, financial aspects and monitoring of surgeons’ compliance will have to be solved before the registry starts functioning on the national level.Conclusions: Survival analysis in total hip arthroplasty is only possible if every registry subject is assigned a unique identification code number that subsequently enables regular updates of data on the deceased subjects from the Central Population Registry. In Slovenia the uniform citizen registry code (EMŠO) or the healthcare insurance number could be used for this purpose if patients gave their informed consent for entry of the data in the registry. Optimal organization of the data analysis would consist of gathering the data in different hospitals in the paper form and sending them to the central institution electronically. The data can then be analyzed by a research group consisting of different hospital representatives whereby each hospital preserves the right to access its own data.