News Shoulder and Elbow Surgery Department wins the Maurice E. Müller Prize

At this year’s annual conference of the Swiss Society of Orthopaedics and Traumatology (SGOT), Dr Michael C. Glanzmann and Cécile Grobet, representing the entire authorship (Prof. Dr. Klaus Eichler, Flurina Meier, Dominik Rickenbacher, Dr Beatrice Brunner and Prof. Dr. Laurent Audigé), won the Maurice E. Müller Prize for the best clinical paper.

The Shoulder and Elbow Surgery Department and the Upper Extremities and Hand Surgery Research Group have spent the last five years conducting a cost-benefit study in cooperation with the Winterthur Institute of Health Economics (led by Prof. Dr. Simon Wieser).

It has long been known that, in the vast majority of cases, replacing the shoulder with an artificial joint significantly improves the quality of life for patients. The question of cost-effectiveness has now been answered for the first time using real data thanks to this award-winning study. Cost data for 150 patients included in the study was collected from Swiss insurance companies and correlated with our patients’ shoulder-specific values (before and after surgery). This demonstrated that the intervention is not only very beneficial for patients, but also clearly cost-effective according to today’s health-economic standards. The study was also awarded the “best paper” prize at the 2019 annual congress of the German Society of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery (DVSE).