[Morbidity following cardiac surgery. A proposal for qualification]

Area of Science:

• Cardiology
• Medical Informatics
• Health Services Research

Context:

• Cardiac surgery is associated with significant morbidity.
• Existing methods for quantifying surgical morbidity are limited.
• There is a need for a standardized tool to assess cardiac surgery outcomes.

Purpose:

• To develop and validate a novel scoring table for quantifying cardiac surgery morbidity.
• To establish the relative impact of individual morbidity events.
• To create a tool for assessing cumulative patient morbidity.

Summary:

• A panel of international experts used the Delphi method to create a scoring table for cardiac surgery morbidity.
• The table assigns scores to individual events and allows for the calculation of a total patient morbidity score.
• The methodology and potential applications of the scoring table are discussed.

Impact:

• The scoring table can be used to compare surgical performance and for quality ranking.
• It provides a quantitative measure for evaluating the severity of morbidity after cardiac surgery.
• Clinical testing is underway to validate the tool's utility in real-world settings.