THE OSCELL DATABASE

Mike Williams and Karina Wright

Funded by the Orthopaedic Institute

The OsCell database is a clinical research database whose maintenance and enhancement has been funded in large part by the Orthopaedic Institute. The database was originally developed in 2010 but has since undergone significant enhancement and now stores data for more than 15,500 patients. Some of the data goes back to the 1990’s, and so there are patients who have more than 20 years of follow up outcome data stored.

Originally it was used to store information for patients who have undergone autologous chondrocyte implantation (ACI) at the RJAH Orthopaedic Hospital. This is a treatment designed to treat chondral/osteochondral defects in the knee, hip, ankle, and elbow. But in recent years it has been enhanced and developed to store information for patients who have undergone a variety of other procedures. It provides a full patient view in that it stores demographic information, operation history, defect details, cell culture information, biopsy, and histology details, and scoring information for MRI and CT scans. It also enables the storage of a variety of patient outcome scores.

The OsCell database fulfils all the requirements of clinical trials data storage in that it is secure, has restricted access and provides an audit trail allowing the history of each data item to be tracked. It is now the primary data store for a number of clinical trials including ASCOT. Recently, data extracted from the OsCell database has been used by research scientists in a series of high profile publications.