Original articleCongenital heart surgeryMeasuring Hospital Performance in Congenital Heart Surgery: Administrative Versus Clinical Registry Data
Section snippets
Data Source
A merged data set containing information coded both in The Society of Thoracic Surgeons Congenital Heart Surgery Database (STS-CHSD—a clinical registry) and the Pediatric Health Information Systems (PHIS) database (an administrative data set) for children undergoing cardiac operations at 33 US children’s hospitals was used for this study.
Study Population
The cohort included 46,056 patients from 33 hospitals. Patient and hospital characteristics are displayed in Table 1. Compared with the overall cohort of hospitals participating in the national STS-CHSD during the study period (n = 114), the 33 hospitals included in the present analysis had a higher average annual volume of pediatric cardiac cases (391 versus 204 cases per year).
Case Ascertainment
The proportion of operations in the overall cohort included within the various case ascertainment systems used in
Comment
The relative merits of different data sources in the assessment of cardiac surgical outcomes have been debated since the 1980s, when concern among cardiac surgeons regarding outcomes reports from the Health Care Financing Administration based on administrative data prompted the formation of registries such as the Northern New England Cardiovascular Disease Study Group registry and the STS Adult Cardiac Surgery Database 25, 26. These data sets were designed to foster complete case ascertainment
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