STS-CCAS Database Update
By David Vener, MD
Texas Children’s Hospital
Database Committee Chair
August 1, 2011 marked the publication of our first STS-CCAS Database with results from calendar year 2010. 18 hospitals submitted at least some data for the calendar year with a total of almost 5,800 anesthetics. These hospitals represent a broad spectrum, both geographically and in case-volume. Of the 5,757 cases analyzed by the Duke Clinical Research Institute, 4,470 were operative cases; the remainder were cardiology (772), mechanical support (146) and non-cardiac cases on cardiac patients (369).
This is an amazing beginning to what will grow to be an incredible wealth of knowledge for us as anesthesia providers. Our partner in this effort, the STS Congenital Cardiac Database, now collects verifiable data from over 100 of the 122 congenital cardiac centers in the United States and is quickly moving forward with extending this effort internationally. We will be able to harness this information and link it with our own anesthesia data to develop risk-adjusted outcomes that will accurately reflect the ongoing state of our practice.
For example, we can combine the data collected by our surgical colleagues and use it in tracking the short and long-term outcomes of patients who’ve experienced an anesthesia-related incident. With sufficient data, we can analyze anesthesia’s role in these outcomes to see, for example, if our complication rates mirror the risk category for the procedure or are independent of the patient’s procedure risk using the existing RACHS, Aristotle or STS-EACTS mortality scores. These scores have been extensively validated and are automatically calculated now based on the patient’s diagnosis, procedure and additional factors such as age or pre-existing morbidities.
This is a process that will take years to fully flesh out, but this is an incredible first step. Our cardiology colleagues are in the process of developing these same predictive outcomes utilizing the data collected and analyzed by them in the C3PO project and we are working to incorporate data from the IMPACT cardiac interventional data into the STS-CCAS model as part of “cradle-to-grave” congenital heart database.
The members of the database committee are pleased to share below the outcome of our first harvest and we look forward to continually working to improve the quality and quantity of data available to participants in the database and we hope to hear from the CCAS membership about what they are looking for from us.
Please link to the following site: (http://www.pedsanesthesia.org/ccas/newsletters/2011winter/STS-CCAS_Database_Update-2010_Data.ppt) for the presentation given to the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Multi-Societal Database Committee for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease, of which the CCAS is a sponsoring organization. It has details on much of the results from our first harvest.
David Vener, MD – Database Committee Chair-Texas Children’s Hospital
Nina Guzzetta, MD
Glyn “Jumbo” Williams, MD
Roxann Barnes, MD
Radi Dinavahi, MD
Courtney Hardy, MD
David Jobes, MD
Frank McGowan, MD
Scott Schulman, MD
Annette Schurre, MD
Anshuman Sharma, MD
James Spaeth, MD
Lena Sun, MD
Mark Twite, MB
Nicole Wilder, MD
