On- and Offline Documentation of Spine Procedures: Spine Tango

Abstract

The mainstay of patient care throughout the ages used to be intuition, psychology and charisma. The medical environment was characterised by unquestioning faith on the part of patients, while society encouraged unwavering self-confidence and dedication to the cause on the part of the clinician. Nevertheless, considerable advances in medical therapy were made. A few early pioneers championed the central importance of systematic assessment of what medical and surgical professionals were doing and what the results of those treatments were. Among them was Florence Nightingale, a nurse, who applied statistical methods to analyse preventable deaths in the British military during the Crimean War as early as 1854. Ernest Codman, a US physician, became famous in the early 1900s for his “end-result system” which stated that every patient needed to be followed up to assess the benefits and complications of the received treatment. Thus, Codman is known as the father of what is today considered as outcomes management in patient care. Later in the twentieth century, Maurice E. Müller, cofounder of AO/ASIF (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Osteosynthese/Association for the Study of Internal Fixation), published his concept of a multisite trauma registry with centralised database for assessment of surgeon performance, efficacy of surgical techniques and postmarket surveillance of implants (Müller ME, Allgöwer M, Willenegger H, Arch klin Chir 304:808–817, 1963).