STS releases outcomes for congenital heart Sx database

(HealthDay)—The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) has released the first publicly accessible report of surgical outcomes from its Congenital Heart Surgery Database (CHSD).

The CHSD is the largest database in North America, focused exclusively on pediatric and congenital cardiac malformations. Twenty-five sites (22.7 percent) participated in the first round of STS Public Reporting Online, similar to the participation seen in the STS Adult Cardiac Surgery Database that began five years ago.

The STS released four-year observed, expected, and risk-adjusted center-level operative mortality rates for the aggregate of all patients for the CHSD participants who opted to publicly report. To take into account procedural complexity and individual patient factors, outcomes have been risk-adjusted. Star ratings are not currently reported for CHSD, but will be added to the summer 2015 release, based on a hospital's overall risk-adjusted observed-to-expected operative mortality ratio.

"Reporting hospital surgical outcomes using risk-adjusted analysis is extremely important because it allows for a fair assessment, on a level playing field, of outcomes across hospitals that treat different populations of patients," Marshall L. Jacobs, M.D., chair of the STS CHSD Task Force, said in a Society news release. "As pediatric and congenital cardiac surgeons, we perform operations on patients born with a wide variety of heart defects of varying complexity, and many patients have additional risk factors. Adjusting for these risk factors allows us to better understand reported mortality rates, especially for centers that operate on the most challenging patients."

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