Keele’s National MSK Audit

This project aims to evaluate the feasibility of a prototype MSK database for providing enhanced health intelligence across community MSK services to improve the quality of care in this setting. It will include real-world patient and clinician inputted data to measure the quality and effectiveness of care provision for patients presenting with common MSK conditions including joint, muscle, or back pain/symptoms.

The study will develop methods to bring together routinely collected clinical data on a large scale (taking learning from Keele’s MIDAS study). It will develop our ability to: collect MSK data at scale, share data and house in a central back-end database/repository (West Midlands Secure Data Environment), integrate data from different sources, and analyse big data including developing benchmarks/identifying outcome variation, ensuring we have the right processes, agreements, and structures in place.

The project will be co-produced with patient partners to ensure that it meets the expectations and needs of those living with MSK conditions and provides both healthcare users and healthcare professionals with a vehicle to capture, assess, monitor, and report treatment outcomes more successfully.

Chief Investigator:	Professor Jonathan Hill
Principal Investigator:	Dr Roanna Burgess
Study Co-ordinator: Email:	Tamanda Millward fmhs.nationalmskaudit@keele.ac.uk
Funder name:	Pfizer Limited (Ref: 70149581) (Phase 1) The British Society of Rheumatology (Phase 2) West Midlands Secure Data Environment (WSDE) (Phase 3)
Ethics:	This study has been reviewed and approved by the South-West - Central Bristol Research Ethics Committee via IRAS for the research database (REC reference number 23/SW/0059, IRAS project ID 324885).  The database will use a consent model for permissions regarding the sharing, storage, and use of patient data.
Year:	Ethics Approval May 2023-2028

Study objectives

Methods:

Study Aim

To evaluate the feasibility of a prototype MSK database for providing enhanced health intelligence across community MSK services to improve the quality of care in this setting.

Design

Observational MSK health intelligence prototype platform allowing routine MSK data to be shared to a central MSK database for collective analysis with the appropriate approvals/permissions in place.

Setting

Community musculoskeletal services providing care across the community which can also include MSK care within primary care settings (e.g. MSK First Contact Practitioner (FCP) clinics).

Eligibility Criteria:

Organisations/Services

Organisations providing MSK services to adult patients (18+) set in the community and able to standardise routine data capture to collect the agreed minimum dataset. Services must have the ability to invite at least 2000 MSK patients to share their data to the prototype MSK database within a 12-month period.

Patients

Adults 18+ years consulting with an MSK pain condition to a participating community MSK service and who provide consent to share their data to the MSK database for research purposes.

Taking Part

We are aiming to engage with 40 MSK/FCP services that are keen to collect our standardised set of MSK metrics. Services will benefit from individualised reports, anonymised benchmarking against peers (to see where your service sits alongside other similar services), quality of care measured against defined quality indicators, and support around using data for quality improvement.

Please contact fmhs.nationalmskaudit@keele.ac.uk if you have any queries.