ASR’s First Annual Spine Report Released

The American Spine Registry has released its first edition Annual Report, which reviewed procedures performed between 2015 and 2023 and offers trends to guide physicians and patient decision-making to improve spine care.

“The ASR has integrated innovative methodologies and established new benchmarks for quality improvement. These efforts have provided valuable insights into the treatment trends for spine care, while highlighting opportunities to refine care pathways and achieve better outcomes for patients,” said Steven D. Glassman, M.D., AAOS appointee co-chair.

Insights include:

• Lumbar Module: ASR has collected data on 230,159 lumbar spine procedures. Posterior lumbar interbody fusion and transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion is the most frequently captured procedure at 32.3% of cases, followed by laminectomy or posterior decompression and other decompressions (29.6%), and posterior lumbar fusion (28.7%).
• Cervical Module: ASR has collected data on 112,683 cervical spine procedures. The procedure category with the most captured procedures is anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) which accounts for 63.2% of procedures. Posterior fusion follows ACDF for most procedures at 23.8% followed by posterior laminectomy at 7.8%. The top three reported cervical diagnoses include spinal stenosis (57.8%), radiculopathy (42.3%) and myelopathy (35.7%).
• Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs): PROMs collection and analysis is a high-value component that will continue to play an integral part in healthcare quality improvement. ASR collects PROMs and encourages sites to submit this data at set intervals—a baseline measure obtained prior to surgery, a measure 90-days post-discharge, and at one-year postoperatively.

While the report features data submitted in 2023, by the end of 2024, 318 institutions were submitting data to the ASR from across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This represents a 5.65% increase in institutions and a 17.86% increase in procedures from the previous year.

Degenerative spine disease is a pervasive health issue, causing significant pain, disability and healthcare costs. Traditional methods of assessing the quality of spine care have often relied on limited data sources, making it difficult to identify best practices and measure outcomes. The ASR has emerged as a powerful tool for driving innovation and improving patient outcomes.

Slides with facts and figures from the report can be found here.

The American Spine Registry (ASR) is a collaborative effort of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) on a national quality improvement registry for spine care. Both organizations have joint ownership and leadership representation in this effort. The ASR will transform the Quality Outcomes Database (QOD) Spine Registry, currently the nation’s largest spine Registry, into a more far-reaching program that facilitates the participation of all U.S.-based spine surgeons in a shared, quality data-collection platform.

The ASR leverages AANS’s data science capabilities with the operational expertise of the AAOS Registry Program. The ASR allows both organizations to enhance the scalability, sustainability, ease-of-use and relevance of national spine data collection efforts and facilitates intelligent data use by engaging multiple healthcare stakeholders in this joint initiative. The participating organizations expect this collaboration will lead to an enhanced ability to use the accumulated information to improve patient care, advance the science of spine surgery, and address the challenges of an evolving, value-based care delivery system.