Creating National Practice Standards Through Collaboration

The volatile state of health care today drives change not only in how we practice as neurosurgeons and physicians but also within the clinical setting and hospital systems. With the push for evidence-based, cost-effective health care, the practice styles of surgeons are slowly changing. However, evidence-based medicine and cost-effectiveness tend not to blend well together as randomized clinical trials are costly but may have high impact on a specialized subpopulation. Computerized database research and registries are a way the medical community can obtain large cohort, real-world outcomes about treatments and devices, which then can be developed into guidelines and protocols to help augment evidence-based care. Both private and academic institutional collaboration with these databases and registries is crucial within the neurosurgical community to continually advance our medical field in a more consistent, safe, and monetarily conscientious manner.