SPINEDATA:SDU is a research community focusing on the course, diagnosis, and treatment of people, who experience spine pain or consult healthcare professionals after experiencing spine pain, within the Danish primary care sector, hospitals and municipalities.
SPINEDATA:SDU forms the basis for the research program. It is a register-based database that contains information from public Danish registers, supplemented with hospital records, survey data, and self-reported data from cohorts of patients with back pain. SPINEDATA:SDU contains data on socio-demographics (age, gender, family status, education, income, etc.), labor market information (transfer income, industry affiliation, job title etc.), medication (especially painkillers), rehabilitation (according to the Service Act and the Health Act) and healthcare utilization in primary care (GPs, physiotherapists, chiropractors), and the secondary sector including diagnoses and procedure codes from hospitals. For subgroups of patients with back pain SPINEDATA:SDU contains information on functional level, pain score, and quality of life, etc.
The research program contributes to the:
· description of patients with back pain and specific subgroups
· descriptions of patients with back pain and their course through the healthcare system across sectors
· description of diagnosis and treatment across sectors
· description of the effects of policies,
· assessment of the effect of treatment,
· validation of indicators/predictors that can be used in the context of quality control
· evaluation of the costs of treatment,
· establishment of prognostic models to support choice of treatment and triage in connection with diagnosis
· highlighting of health inequalities.
The coordination group for SPINEDATA:SDU consists of:
Researcher and data analysist Christian Skovgaard (Danish Center for Health Economics, Department of Public Health)
Professor Jan Hartvigsen (Center for Muscle and Joint Health, Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics)
Professor Berit Schiøttz-Christensen (Research Unit of General Practice, Department of Public Health)
Responibility for the database lies with Professor Kim Rose Olsen (Danish Center for Health Economics, Department of Public Health)