STS-CCAS Database Update
By David Vener, MD
Texas Children’s Hospital
Database Committee Chair
The CCAS-STS Congenital Cardiac Database is off to a great start. The Fall 2011 data harvest, representing the first 18 months of our efforts from January 2010 through July 2011, yielded over 10,000 patient entries from 26 out of the approximately 120 congenital heart programs in the United States. The geographic location and size of program participation was remarkably broad.
Approximately 75% of the cases reported were from the cardiac ORs, with the remainder largely coming from cath labs and a handful of cases from other locations such as Radiology or the General OR. There was a reported 2.2% of anesthesia-related adverse events, including 36 cases of unexpected difficult intubation and 35 cases of inadvertent arterial puncture during central venous access. This data was presented at the CCAS Annual Meeting this past February in Tampa, FL.
As programs become more familiar with the data collection process and the advantages to participating we are hopeful that our “market penetration” both in terms of capturing all cases at a given site and expanding the number of participants grows. At the same time, the Database committee continues to refine our data set.
We are currently in the midst of the triennial review of data along with the STS Congenital Heart Database Committee. The upcoming changes include expanding the categories of preoperative medications while “lumping” together some of the individual drugs currently listed into broader drug categories such “ACE Inhibitors” rather than specific agents.
The surgeons have elected to no longer collect blood transfusion data in their section, while the anesthesia committee has decided to clarify and continue the transfusion data in our data set and the same is true with neuromonitoring. Our shared goals are to both try and simplify the process to make it easier for data entry yet comprehensive enough to capture important information. All of these changes will be effective starting January 2013.
We hope to have our first publication come out of the database within the next year, outlining the processes utilized in conceptualizing, organizing and finally implementing the database and reporting on these initial results.
Thank you for your continued support and please do not hesitate to contact me or other committee members for more detailed information about the database.
