Finding orthopedic patients lost to follow-up for long-term outcomes research using the Internet: an update for 2012.

The Internet is available to researchers as a tool for studying long-term outcomes, but no recent research exists on how to best use it. The authors hypothesize that using the Internet can be at least 75% effective in locating patients lost to follow-up. With Institutional Review Board approval, the authors searched for 66 patients lost to follow-up after a period of 10 years or more with no contact. They tested an Internet searching protocol developed in 2004 and developed an alternate protocol. In all, 74% (49/66) of patients were located.