Heart Surgery Outcomes Reporting Project
Committed to Transparency in Our Cardiac Surgical Results
The Heart Institute at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital has a longstanding commitment to transparency in our clinical outcomes. We believe that patients and parents should have access to validated clinical data in order to make informed decisions regarding pediatric care, and that publicly reporting data is a powerful incentive to quality improvement in care.
In 2001, our Cardiac Program began publishing clinical results on the Internet. In 2013, with more advanced reporting capabilities, we launched an initiative to replace the previous public reporting. We reverse engineered the Society of Thoracic Congenital database queries and inclusion/exclusion criteria in order to provide real time surgical results.
Today, our Real Time Outcome Report replicates the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) results. We then validate the results by hand when the biannual STS report is released. The Real Time Outcomes Report sources dynamic data daily from the directly from the Cardioaccess database. We include non-risk adjusted mortality as well as length of postoperative stay. We believe postoperative length of stay is a surrogate marker for complications and excellence of outcomes: our median Norwood length of stay of 16 days versus the STS length of stay of 49 days indicates a very low incidence of tracheostomy, gastrostomy, or neurological complications. Results are posted electronically and only validated for accuracy without additional editing.
