The CHSS Quality Committee with the support of the Executive Council is pleased to provide an update on the ongoing CHSS Quality Assurance Project, available to all members of the Society. The initiative is consistent with a new and major strategic focus of the CHSS on quality assurance and quality improvement. The aim of the current QA Project is to track and analyze mortality and reinterventions in patients undergoing a select group of procedures at six months and one year. For the first time, this project will prospectively follow early post-discharge outcomes and be able to compare these events, confidentially, of individual centers to a large aggregate of participating CHSS centers. Centers will be able to access this data as an in-house quality tool, capturing outpatient data on their congenital surgical population.
The data for this project is managed by the Kirklin Institute for Research in Surgical Outcomes(KIRSO).We have developed a linkage process by which US centers can submit their adjudicated data harvest files, created for the national congenital heart surgery database, directly via a password protected web-based process. Individual centers will be able to access their complete data via a password-protected dashboard. The center will then be prompted to import individual patient 6 month and oneyear follow-up information. Based on the information provided, CHSS would generate confidential center-specific QA reports comparing center outcomes to the aggregate of all centers.
The project currently involves 15 US centers, with follow-up data out to one year now available. We hope you and your institution are interested in this project and willing to contribute to this important quality process. If you are interested in learning more about this important CHSS initiative, please contact James St. Louis (jstlouis@augusta.edu) for future details concerning participation. Also, please do not hesitate to contact us directly with further questions or comments on this project.
Sincerely,
Dr David Overman; CHSS President
Dr Erle Austin, Chair; CHSS Committee on Quality Improvement and Outcomes
Dr James Kirklin, Chair; CHSS Research Committee
Dr James St. Louis MD; PI CHSS Quality Assurance Project
View Letter of Invitation