A Dashboard for Tracking Mortality After Cardiac Surgery Using a National Administrative Database

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Surgery
• Health Services Research
• Medical Informatics

Background:

• Publicly reported cardiac surgery mortality metrics often lack institutional detail and are limited to 30-day outcomes.
• Dashboards offer a valuable method for aggregating data to pinpoint areas for quality enhancement in healthcare.
• National organizations utilize mortality data as a key quality metric for cardiac surgery.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a cardiac surgery performance dashboard using a national administrative dataset.
• To enable institutions to analyze clinical outcomes and compare performance against benchmarks.
• To facilitate identification of trends and areas for quality improvement in cardiac surgery.

Main Methods:

• Utilized Medicare Limited Data Sets from April 2016 to March 2017.
• Identified cardiac surgery admissions using diagnosis-related group (DRG) codes for valve and coronary bypass surgeries.
• Developed a dashboard prototype for performance analysis and benchmarking.

Main Results:

• The dashboard allows comparison of individual hospital performance against state and national benchmarks.
• Mortality rates are available at 30, 60, 90 days, and 1 year post-operatively.
• Users can filter data by state, hospital, and surgeon, visualizing comparisons to national metrics.

Conclusions:

• The developed database facilitates inter-hospital comparisons at local, state, and national levels.
• The dashboard aids in identifying mortality trends and opportunities for quality improvement in cardiac surgery.
• This tool empowers institutions to benchmark their performance and drive quality enhancements.