Overview: maintaining outcomes for total hip arthroplasty. The past, present, and future.

Developing and maintaining outcomes for total hip arthroplasty, resulting in meaningful and usable data, presents many challenges for today's clinician. Outcomes data collected must show patients' clinical, functional, and overall quality of life status. Data also must be appropriate to illustrate efficiency, effectiveness, and value of medical interventions provided to payers. Previous and current measures of assessing outcomes of total hip arthroplasty are presented, evaluated, and discussed. Recommended standards for the future, including the identification of specific data needed such as demographics, Short Form-36, patient satisfaction, length of stay, infection rate, return to surgery, and revision rates are introduced, leading to an outcomes based suggested standard of care for total hip arthroplasty with application to patients, providers, and payers.