Claims Database Research in Hand Surgery: From Data to Bedside

The widespread availability of administrative claims data has unlocked opportunities to answer challenging clinical questions in hand surgery, overcoming the limitations of traditional data sets. Researchers are taking advantage of claims data sets to obtain samples from broader segments of the population and achieve statistical power that was previously unattainable. Therefore, a basic understanding of claims database research is quickly becoming an invaluable tool in the surgeon’s toolkit, enabling the performance of ground-breaking research and the critical evaluation of data-driven results to inform clinical practice. We provide an overview of methodological approaches to claims data analysis for hand surgery and a roadmap for analyzing and interpreting these studies in clinical practice.