An overview of the methods and data used in the CCORT Canadian Cardiovascular Atlas project

The Canadian Cardiovascular Atlas project, an initiative of the Canadian Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Team (CCORT), will be published as a series of 20 articles in future issues of the Canadian Journal of Cardiology. Through a wide range of data sources and analyses from a number of collaborators across Canada, the CCORT Atlas will provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of cardiac care and disease in Canada. Administrative data, clinical registries and community survey data will be analyzed at the provincial and health region levels. The purposes of this article are to 1) provide an overview of the data types and sources used in the Atlas project, 2) give a general description of the methods and analyses used to report Atlas data and 3) describe how Atlas maps were created and how they can be interpreted.