Jornal de Coluna e Neurocirurgia

Simple 'Do it Yourself' System for Patients Database

Sassi M, Spada A, Pascale V, Pascale W, Lavanga V, Sansone VC and Boria P

Objectives: To Illustrate An EasyToUse Tool For Collection Of Clinical Follow-up Data. To Obtain An Effective And Reliable System For The Collection And Management Of Clinical Records In FollowUp Studies. To Obtain AutomaticallyUpdated, Anonymous Records Charting The Evolution Of Symptoms After Surgery. Methods: We Designed A “Do It Yourself” Web Survey Using Google Forms And Alerted Patients Via SMS (Short Message System) To Complete It. We Developed An EasyToUse System To Investigate Follow-up Results, And Tested It On A Series Of Patients Treated Surgically For Degenerative Lumbar Disc Disease. Our Methodological Approach Is Based On Fast And Do It Yourself (DIY) Web Based Tools. Considering Our Past Experience Of Collecting FollowUp Data With Traditional HardCopy Documents, Our System Proved To Be More Agile And TimeEfficient. Results: Data Collection Lasted 40 Days, Differing In Average Among The Age Groups. Overall Compliance Reached 100% Conclusions: Our method proved to be highly effective, requiring little effort from the investigators. Collected data could be combined to achieve greater sample sizes for longitudinal webbased studies.