About OrthoMetrics

Why follow outcomes?

Evidence-based practice, patient follow-up, and treatment-outcome assessment are now part of everyday professional life. Patients, hospitals, referrers, funders, and device suppliers all have a stake in understanding results. The strongest position for a clinician is to know their own outcomes, using data collected in a clinically meaningful way.

OrthoMetrics helps turn routine care into an outcomes record that belongs to the treating team: patient-reported scores, operation details, complications, follow-up status, and exportable datasets in one place.

What outcomes data helps you do

• Inform patients with your own data. Patients increasingly arrive with scores, online information, and expectations about their recovery. Knowing your own results lets you explain likely outcomes in the context of their condition, procedure, and risk factors.
• Communicate clearly with referrers. Objective and patient-reported outcome data can support letters, updates, and audit discussions with GPs, funders, hospitals, and colleagues.
• Review complications and trends early. Tracking outcomes over time makes it easier to notice unexpected patterns, deteriorating scores, missing follow-up, or procedure groups that deserve closer review.
• Keep control of your outcome narrative. Hospitals, insurers, administrators, and registries may already collect fragments of outcome data. Clinician-owned data helps explain the clinical context behind a good or poor result.
• Monitor implants and devices. Orthopaedic devices can perform differently once used at scale. Following your own outcomes helps identify concerns without waiting for external reports or delayed market signals.
• Justify new techniques and technology. Outcomes data can support cost-benefit discussions when adopting new procedures, implants, pathways, or technologies.
• Support audit, research, and publication. Structured data collection makes abstracts, presentations, registry comparisons, service reviews, and retrospective studies more practical.

Own your own outcomes

Outcomes collection should not be an occasional spreadsheet exercise or something done only by third parties. Increasing expectations from patients, hospitals, payers, and professional bodies mean that ongoing assessment is becoming part of routine surgical practice.

Be the first to know how your patients are doing. OrthoMetrics is built to make that practical: collect PROMs, link them to real procedures, understand your results, and keep the data close to the clinical decisions it should inform.

Built for New Zealand orthopaedic practice

• NHI is a first-class identifier; NZ date formats (DD/MM/YYYY) and NZ mobile validation are built in.
• Follow-up schedules are locally configurable to match the cadences NZ surgeons already use, including pre-op, 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months and 2 years.
• Automatic SMS and email messages are sent at 8:00 AM New Zealand time, with proper unsubscribe handling and consent tracking.
• Patient PDF summaries include the progress chart and a plain-language explanation of scores for clinic letters or patient discussion.
• The core application and database are hosted on Catalyst Cloud in New Zealand; email, SMS, and billing suppliers are limited to the data needed for those services and are documented in the Privacy Policy.

Designed for the way surgeons actually work

• Operation-based. Each PROM belongs to a specific operation episode, so patients can have more than one procedure tracked over time without their data getting muddled.
• Exception-driven. The dashboard surfaces only what needs attention — missing operative details, overdue PROMs, non-responders, failed delivery — not the long list of patients doing fine.
• Research-ready. Reports lets you build cohorts by procedure, surgeon, implant, side, timepoint, consent status, and completeness, then export a de-identified, citation-ready dataset with a data dictionary.
• Multi-surgeon aware. Consultant and registrar roles, approved-access workflows, and per-surgeon scoping are baked in.

Security & privacy

OrthoMetrics is designed to support operation under the Privacy Act 2020 and the Health Information Privacy Code 2020 (HIPC 2020). Its security controls use the HISO 10029 Health Information Security Framework and current Health New Zealand guidance as design references; it is not HISO-certified.

• Encrypted at rest. Patient identifiers (NHI, mobile, email) are encrypted using AES-256-GCM with keys held outside the database.
• MFA-gated. Authenticator-based multi-factor authentication is required before any clinician account can save real patient data.
• Auditable. Clinically meaningful actions — patient creation, consent changes, messaging events, exports, access — are recorded in an audit log.
• Role-aware. Role-based access scopes each clinician to their own patients, or to consultants who have explicitly approved access.
• NZ-hosted core. The database and application servers run on Catalyst Cloud, a New Zealand-owned and New Zealand-based provider; backup storage and restore evidence are managed through the operator's private supplier and SOP records.
• Consent-gated messaging. Automatic SMS and email are blocked until a patient grants consent; unsubscribe and STOP-keyword opt-outs are honoured immediately.

OrthoMetrics has not undergone formal third-party privacy or security certification. Each clinic or agency operating a deployment is responsible for its own Privacy Impact Assessment, retention schedule, breach response plan, and compliance attestation. The full Privacy Policy describes what is collected, how it is used, and patient rights in detail.