The Danish Multidisciplinary Hip Fracture Registry 13-Year Results from a Population-Based Cohort of Hip Fracture Patients

Abstract

Aim of the Registry

The aim of the Danish Multidisciplinary Hip Fracture Registry (DMHFR) is to collect data on processes of treatment, nursing care and rehabilitation as well as outcomes for patients with hip fracture in Denmark, and thereby monitor and improve the quality.

Study Population

Hip fracture patients at age 65 or older that have undergone surgery with arthroplasty or internal fixation since 2004.

Main Variables

DMHFR collects quality indicators and descriptive variables. Quality indicators include eight process performance measures within treatment, nursing care and rehabilitation, reflecting recommendations from the national clinical guideline for hip fracture patients, and three outcome measures including survival within 30-days, unplanned acute readmission within 30 days and reoperation within 2 years. Descriptive variables include a number of patient- and surgery-related characteristics. All data are collected prospectively.

Results

By the end of 2018, the DMHFR included 86,438 hip fracture patients. Since 2006, all hospital departments in Denmark, treating patients with hip fracture, have reported improvement in quality of care and improvement in survival, and reoperation over time as well as high completeness of variables registration.

Conclusion

The DMHFR is a well-established nationwide clinical registry, which plays a key role for monitoring and improving hip fracture care in Denmark. The registry can further be linked to a range of other nationwide registries in order to answer a number of relevant clinical research questions.

Keywords:

• hip fracture
• quality indicators
• registry
• mortality
• reoperation
• readmission

Acknowledgments

We thank the staff at the hospital departments involved in treatment of patients with hip fracture for their continuous effort and contribution in acquiring the data in the DMHFR. Also, we thank the steering Committee of the DMHFR for their ongoing effort with development, interpretation and evaluation of quality indicators and thereby quality improvement.

Ethics

The study was approved by the Danish Data Protection Agency (journal number 2012-41-1274) and carried out in accordance with the principle of the Declaration of Helsinki. The requirement for consent was waived as registry-based studies do not require formal ethical approval according to the Danish law. Patient data was kept confidential.

Disclosure

Pia Kristensen reports grants from Health Research Fund of Central Denmark Region, during the conduct of the study. The authors report no other conflicts of interest in this work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Health Research Fund of Central Denmark Region (Pia Kjær Kristensen). The financial sponsors did not play a role in the design, execution, analysis, interpretation of data, or writing of the study.