The Canadian Spine Society’s Canadian Spine Outcomes and Research Network (CSORN) has grown to 22 sites and over 15,000 participants since its’ inception. With the growing amount of participating sites and participants, the question of data capture and quality becomes increasingly important. The Canadian Spine Society has taken the initiative to improve data quality and attrition in CSORN by hiring Eden Richardson the CSORN Data Quality Research Coordinator to oversee this task.
In order to monitor the data quality and capture, training documents were created and data quality reports for CSORN are completed a couple times a year. Eden consistently develops and implements quality control procedures for CSORN. She is the main contact for sites who have questions in order to or who have follow-up, or quality issues they want to discuss. Eden also is the main trainer for all new coordinators on CSORN, so everyone has the same training and all new coordinators understand CSORN protocols.
In 2020, the CSORN Steering Committee created a Data Cleaning Committee which includes Dr. A. Soroceanu, Dr. T. Alion, Greg McIntosh and Eden Richardson. This committee works together to audit both clinical/patient data, and work with an external researcher to create a comprehensive data set for participating sites to use for their studies annually.
CSORN has high data quality expectations. It is expected all CSORN participating sites to eventually have over 95% data completion rate for all questions on all CSORN forms, however, a small percentage of missing data or incorrectly filled out forms is anticipated.
The CSORN follow up rate expectation is that participating sites are within 10% of the national average CSORN follow up rate for 6-18 week, 12 month and 24 month follow-ups, with a minimum goal of 80%, based on bi-annual scheduled data quality review.