Toward a Set Up of National Registries in Asia-Pacific Countries Upon Orthopaedic Implants within the Aegis of APAC-Med: the OrthoWave Proposal
APAC: ASIA PACIFIC MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION
Health care and its many complexities are changing weekly, if not daily all over the world, and in particular in Asia and Pacific countries. As a moving target, each National health care system and what it will be in 2 years or 10 years is difficult to predict based upon a number of variables, the vast majority over which we have little control. However, one underlying theme has and always will be constant in medicine: the need to understand if our treatments, both surgical and non-surgical, actually work. And, if they do not, we must ask, “Why not?”. Providing answers makes not only scientific sense but pragmatic and economic sense as well. Answering this question meaningfully with respect to specific treatments is the crux of the matter; the proper application of software, hardware, and relational databases when properly designed and understood by its users can help us in evaluating complex issues surrounding the answers to this critical question.
The mission of APACMed is to improve the standards of care through innovative collaborations among stakeholders to jointly shape the future of healthcare in Asia Pacific. Based upon this very enthusiastic means of “shaping the future of healthcare”, we would like to introduce our computerized outcomes studies tool, the OrthoWave™ on line software suite (ARIA Ltd, Houdain, France) which would be able after 20 years of successful use in Europe, to bring a consistent, proven, and efficient mechanism to the Asia-Pacific countries in an attempt to harness the complexities of outcomes research by focusing on orthopaedic implants placed in extremities of patients at a rate and volume known to no other registry in the world.
This OrthoWave project seems to us on perfect line with the APACMed Business Focus and could at best, through effective partnerships with any organization or companies based in Asia and/or Pacific countries, meet the expectation of APAC upon initiatives and activities addressing the needs of the diverse healthcare markets in the region relating to access, innovation and collaboration: In such a way, these partnerships would improve access to high quality healthcare for patients in need by working in close collaboration with regulators, policy makers, healthcare providers, payers and patients to develop and propose policies that ensure effective and efficient courses of treatment within the area of orthopaedic implants.This innovative outcome study tool, which could easily get extended to other areas of surgical treatments or medicine, would help to promote a cost-effective, value-based approach to healthcare in Asia Pacific by showing the socio-economic weight of innovative medical technology that improves healthcare outcomes and quality of care. Such an initiative could be of value to raise one of the goal of APAC, i.e. developing new and unified solutions to meet the demands of the diverse and complex healthcare markets in Asia Pacific and provide a platform for knowledge exchange.
Up for the challenge
Up for the challenge
Our global APAC registry project is leveraging Software as a Service (SaaS) in the delivery of an orthopaedic outcomes-based software application, i.e. OrthoWave™, to facilitate the development of Asia-Pacific registries, be they simply epidemiologic or fully observational. OrthoWave™ (OW) is a software suite built on a relational database, providing end-user client applications and storage analysis tools. The software has been developed by surgeons for surgeons for the evaluation of joint arthroplasty, and represents a mature, refined, and widely used system in Europe for this particular purpose, summing a huge on line (cloud computing) observational database of more than 200,000 hip and knee prostheses, fed by more than 1000 orthopaedic surgeons to date including the so-called “regular databases OW-RDB”, as well as “scientific databases OW-SDB” and “monitored databases OW-MDB”.
As outlined below, our OrthoWave organization plans to participate with the leading orthopaedic joint replacement outcome research centers in the Asia and/or Pacific countries in the development of the registries and offer OW to orthopaedic surgeons to facilitate the collection of outcomes data. This on line study tool would thus offer a tested, affordable, easy-to-use, and robust relational database to collect and manage arthroplasty outcomes in real-time, allowing orthopaedic surgeons and researchers to draw meaningful and timely scientific and economic conclusions. These conclusions will lead to improved patient care, research, regulation, and standards. Healthcare Cost savings will, in turn, be secured due to improved data analyses that lead to the use of the best implants, reducing the number of unnecessary or revision surgeries.
The establishment of such registries sponsored by the APAC partners will result in orthopaedic surgeons – getting involved in related countries – being strongly encouraged or required to report the outcomes of their arthroplasties. The data to be collected by the registries will provide critical information to practitioners, regulatory bodies, insurance carriers, manufacturers, and patients. To this date, attempts to establish national registries have often failed in many countries. The failures have been attributed to variety of reasons, all related to the size and complexity of the market, and that healthcare software providers lacked adequate outcomes knowledge, resulting in poorly designed databases and a wide spectrum of (mostly in-house developed) software to collect, transmit, query and analyze the data. The OrthoWave organization offers a unique opportunity to assist APAC in the development of Asia-Pacific outcomes registries and to provide surgeons and researchers with a tool to collect and transmit data to the registries with a tried and tested system that has undergone 20 years of continuous development, refinement and use across lots of institutions spanning various continents.
Knowledge and experience is power and secures more effectiveness, particularly in the field of outcomes research. The OrthoWave team, which includes Dr. Jean-Alain Epinette, a renowned hip and knee replacement surgeon from France and creator of OrthoWave™, possesses a critical working knowledge of the successful European registries. Dr. Epinette has been a leader in technical innovations for gathering, feeding, retrieving and analyzing data with respect to such registries through the world-leading software package that he and his team from France have created.
The OrthoWave software suite is owned by the ARIA Ltd company, which aims to settle any partnership directly with any organization or sub-organization belonging to APAC, or alternately with any CRO or Medical/Computer company which would be interested in the project, within the aegis of APAC or aside.The OrthoWave Global Organization (OWGO) would help to contact the leading centers which have been identified as likely applicants for the APAC registries. Aside this global APAC registry project, OrthoWave and its partners in ASIA/PACIFIC will tend to approach a newly-created orthopaedic outcomes data gathering market. The primary goal will be to market the OW facilities to organizations and practitioners as a SaaS (Software as a service) offering. The SaaS model will minimize upfront investment costs for hardware and software, minimize ongoing costs for technology personnel to manage the system in-house, and provide access to the latest software version at all times, thus offering to practitioners consistent ease of use, minimal upfront software and hardware investments, and superior trend reporting.OWGO will provide implementation, data collection, and training services to practitioners acquiring OW as a SaaS or in-house solution. The OrthoWave team would in addition offer consulting services to these applicants to assist in the design of any new development by leveraging the knowledge of the already functioning registries and software suites, especially in the field of related health data compliance requirements. OWGO will help bridge potential communication, time zone and business management issues, as well as the logistics of assisting the French software development team, while ensuring that the software for the APAC registries has a familiar ‘look and feel’ to users, a fully competent commissioning, maintenance and support base, and a highly competitive cost/price.
Strategic alliances will be a significant component of the OWGO approach to sharing the ASIA-PACIFIC market, while establishing relationships with key healthcare software providers. ln addition to practitioner access, these large software providers have systems that OrthoWave may need to interface with to transfer data to OW and then to any newly created or existing registry. OWGO will direct alliance efforts at those organizations with the most significant market penetration or promise of such penetration in orthopaedic surgery. In addition, OWGO would also explore potential relationships with any direct software competitors, should they arise and show promise.In order to help ensuring a close cooperation at the time the project gets started as well as in the view of future developments and maintenance, The OrthoWave team naturally envisions any future contact and/or visit to the APAC organization, upon mutual interest in such a plan. One member of our OWGO team comes from international business with a Major in Finances (Regents, London UK) and speaks fluently French, English and Chinese (Mandarin). He would stay permanently in Singapore or in any other location in Asian countries in order to help keeping the project on the rails at any time, whilst offering a constant link with our French organization.