The Children’s of Alabama cardiothoracic surgery program is among the nation’s best in expected-to-observed mortality rate.
A pivotal way to measure a program’s success is by comparing it to others. And according to outcomes recorded in the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) National Database, the Children’s of Alabama cardiothoracic surgery program continues to surpass national trends.
“In 2023, quality is the big catchphrase, but the only way we know we’re providing the best care is to look at results,” Robert Dabal, M.D., chief of pediatric cardiothoracic surgery at Children’s said. “The database allows us to analyze data over lots of different time frames—months or years. It gives us the ability to look at results over time to make sure we’re always improving.”
Established in 1989, the database has become the gold standard for clinical registries, containing data on more than 8.8 million patients and 4,300 surgeons. An important subset is the STS Congenital Heart Surgery Database, which has captured records from more than 600,000 congenital heart surgeries in North America with more than 1,000 physicians. It monitors metrics such as patient complications, reoperations and deaths.
Cardiothoracic surgeons at Children’s perform about 440 congenital heart surgeries each year. The database shows that patients who might not survive in other hospitals are surviving at Children’s, Dabal explained. “Our observed mortality is less than the expected mortality, which is right where we want to be.”
Additionally, the most recent analysis of all pediatric cardiothoracic surgery programs in the Southeast shows Children’s has the second-lowest rates in the region—and one of the lowest rates in the country—in that same expected-to-observed mortality category. Combining the STS data with information culled from several other databases helps provide both a big-picture and granular assessment of Children’s progress and where it may still fall short.
“Perfect is not a realistic goal in medicine, but continually improving your results is an attainable goal,” Dabal said. “That’s why we’re always looking at these results.”
Even the best databases, however, can’t capture all factors related to a program’s success or goals. Along those lines, Dabal hopes future iterations can track young congenital heart patients’ long-term outcomes, not just perioperative data points.
“Most of our patients survive their operation, so the larger pediatric cardiothoracic community is focused on what happens to them one year, five years or 10 years out,” he said. “We want patients to survive surgery, of course, but also to lead normal lives—to go to school, get married and have children of their own. Our bigger focus is looking at the long-term quality of the outcomes we’re providing.”
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