Temporal trends in medical device implant procedures in Australia 2008–22: evidence from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare National Hospital Morbidity database

Mohammad Afshar Ali; Thu-Lan Kelly; Marianne Gillam

doi:10.1071/AH23126

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

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Temporal trends in medical device implant procedures in Australia 2008–22: evidence from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare National Hospital Morbidity database

Mohammad Afshar Ali

^A ^* , Thu-Lan Kelly

^B and Marianne Gillam

^A

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A Allied Health and Human Performance, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia.

^B Clinical and Health Sciences, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia.

^* Correspondence to: afshar0506@gmail.com

Australian Health Review 48(5) 530-538 https://doi.org/10.1071/AH23126

Submitted: 24 May 2023 Accepted: 22 May 2024 Published: 17 June 2024

© 2024 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of AHHA. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

Objective

Examine the temporal trends in medical device implant procedures in the Australian population.

Methods

We used data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare from the financial years 2007–08 to 2021–22 and chose the most frequently performed medical device implant procedures. We estimated the annual change in volume of procedures and age-standardised rates by calculating the compound annual growth rate (CAGR), and used regression with the Newey–West robust variance estimator to examine whether there was a linear trend in the age-standardised rates for each procedure.

Results

For procedures including cardiac pacemakers, heart valves, hip and knee arthroplasties, and intraocular lenses, the crude CAGR was over 3%. For the age-standardised rates, the CAGR was largest for cardiac pacemaker, followed by heart valve replacement and hip arthroplasty procedures. For some procedures, the growth was more than in the Australian population, including cardiac pacemakers (β = 1.00; 95% CI: 0.14–1.86), heart valve replacements (β = 0.41; 95% CI: 0.28–0.54), hip arthroplasty (β = 3.50; 95% CI: 1.61–5.38), and knee arthroplasty (β = 4.31; 95% CI: 0.54–8.09) procedures. The trend of standardised rates of procedures, including incisional hernia with mesh, breast implants, coronary stents, and cardiac defibrillators, grew at the same rate as the population, whereas the rate for gastric banding procedures decreased (β = −3.14; 95% CI: −4.92 to −1.34).

Conclusion

The findings from the current study, showing a large increase in medical device implant procedures, will assist in future healthcare planning and efforts in post-market surveillance of safety of medical devices.

Keywords: Australia, healthcare, medical device implants, medical procedure, trend analysis.

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