Research | M-CHOIR

In its short history, the Comprehensive Hand Center has been greeted with multiple achievements and opportunities. Hand Surgery at Michigan Medicine has transformed over the past decade and our international prominence as a center of excellence has grown as a result. The Comprehensive Hand Center planning is underway. I hope within a few years, I can welcome you to our building that will house not only hand surgery, but will include hand therapy, PM&R, operating suites, and a number of other specialists. This facility will truly be a Hand Center with the comprehensive and collaborative character that we envisioned over the past 20 years. We are proud to start this process and include all of hand surgery, regardless of specialty affiliations.

Above all, Hand Surgery at the University of Michigan is dedicated to excellent patient care. Our clinical enterprise continues to grow, now offering comprehensive care of the hand and upper extremity.

Fellowships

The University of Michigan Hand Surgery Fellowship was established in 2010 as the only Hand Fellowship in the State of Michigan and it remains the sole program in our state today. This one-year fellowship provides comprehensive clinical and research training in hand surgery for two trainees per year. Our fellowship has rapidly become recognized as a very competitive program and the candidates coming to interview are highly accomplished. We have recruited excellent candidates through the match for multiple cycles and we are proud of this before, during and after their fellowship. In general, hand surgery training is also becoming more competitive as the number of applicants exceeds the spaces available for training every year.

Hand Center Planning

​The Hand Center is currently in the early planning phases. It will take our virtual hand center and create a physical space for Orthopedic and Plastic surgery trained hand surgeons, doctors, and occupational therapy. Providers will include specially trained PAs to work alongside the hand surgeons. The plan for the center will include several exam room “pods” with approximately 30 exam rooms in total and up to 7 procedure rooms for outpatient surgery. Radiology will be adjacent to the center and Occupational Therapy will be housed within the center for ease of access for patients. The Comprehensive Musculoskeletal Center will also share neighboring space to fully provide care of the total upper extremity.

Occupational Therapy and Physical Therapy Residency Program

​The University of Michigan Health System Occupational Therapy and Physical Therapy Division is proud to offer a comprehensive hand therapy residency program. This fellowship program is designed to provide occupational therapists with the advanced knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in the field of hand therapy.

To learn more about the Michigan Medicine Comprehensive Hand Center click here.

Patient-rated outcomes have become the centerpiece of the outcomes movement, as improvement and overall well-being are becoming the most desired form of outcomes valued by payers. While researchers have developed instruments such as the Short Form-36 (SF-36) to measure and quantify overall health status, these general questionnaires may not capture the outcomes of interest for patients with upper extremity injuries and conditions.

We have developed a hand-specific outcomes instrument: the Michigan Hand Outcomes Questionnaire (MHQ) - by applying psychometric principles to construct a tool capable of measuring health status domains that are important to patients with hand disorders.

The validity and responsiveness of the MHQ has been proven for a variety of common hand conditions and it is currently being used as the primary outcomes instrument in several multi-center NIH-funded trials. The broad utility of the MHQ gives researchers the benefit of using only one questionnaire for outcomes research related to the hand. This provides an opportunity to compare outcomes across different hand conditions.

For additional information, including how to obtain the MHQ, please visit the MHQ Website.

This tool is designed to help improve record keeping, track outcomes, and permit researchers to more accurately study the surgical outreach efforts to low- and middle-income countries. The data points included in this data collection sheet have been identified as important for the development of policy, conducting surgical research, performing economic analyses, among other basic analyses of global surgical outreach efforts to low- and middle-income countries. The instrument includes two components: the datasheet and the codebook.

You can download the data instrument for free and get more info here.

Surgical global outreach is a growing area of interest to various public health organizations and health care providers. M-CHOIR aims to provide insight for various plastic surgery global outreach efforts.  

Who Are We?

The Michigan Collaborative Hand Initiative for Quality in Surgery (M-CHIQS) is a 9-center non-profit collaborative of hand surgeons in the Midwest and Eastern US. It is organized under the University of Michigan and has received funding from the American Society for Surgery of the Hand.

​Participating Centers and Lead Surgeons:​

• University of Michigan - Dr. Kevin Chung and Dr. Jessica Billig
• Indiana University Health - Dr. Joshua Adkinson
• University of Pittsburgh Medical Center - Dr. John Fowler
• OrthoCarolina Hand Center - Dr. R. Glenn Gaston
• Emory Orthopaedics, Sports & Spine - Dr. Michael Gottschalk and Dr. Eric Wagner
• University of Rochester Medical Center - Dr. Warren Hammert
• Curtis National Hand Center - Dr. Ryan Katz and Dr. Avi Giladi
• Wake Forest Baptist Health - Dr. John Li
• Mayo Clinic - Dr. Marco Rizzo

​What Is Our Mission?

M-CHIQs aims to improve the QUALITY of patient care in hand surgery. We aim to do this by:

• Working collaboratively with providers to collect, analyze and report data
• Maintaining confidentiality of all data regarding patients, providers and practices
• Measuring variation in clinical practice
• Providing timely feedback to providers to continuously improve quality
• Learning from one another
• Building collaborative relationships across specialties and practices
• Using evidence-based medicine
• Using our data to inform policy on clinical guidelines

How Will We Accomplish Our Mission?

Our first initiative will focus on improving the diagnosis and treatment of carpal tunnel surgery. Patient data will be collected approximately 30 days after carpal tunnel release.