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As a national leader in health care transparency and accountability, The Society of Thoracic Surgeons believes that the public has a right to know the quality of surgical outcomes.

To further this goal, the Society has established the STS Public Reporting initiative, which allows participants in the STS National Database to voluntarily report their surgical outcomes to the public on the STS website.

Public Reporting is available for three of the STS National Database components:

Adult Cardiac Surgery Database (ACSD)

Congenital Heart Surgery Database (CHSD)

General Thoracic Surgery Database (GTSD)

The first public reporting scores and ratings were published in September 2010 on isolated coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery data that were included in the ACSD. Since then, the initiative has grown to include isolated aortic valve replacement (AVR), combined AVR and CABG (AVR+CABG), isolated mitral valve replacement/repair (MVRR), and combined MVRR and CABG (MVRR+CABG) from the ACSD, observed-to-expected operative mortality ratios for procedures in the CHSD, and lobectomy for lung cancer and esophagectomy procedures in the GTSD.

Using this information, consumers can see how participating cardiac surgical groups compare with national benchmarks for overall performance, survival, complications, and other measures.

It is important to understand that these scores compare the results of a hospital or surgical practice/group with those of an average hospital or practice participating in the Database and treating patients with the same mix of severity of illness. Even when the results are risk-adjusted, it is not necessarily appropriate to compare directly the scores of individual hospitals or surgical groups to each other, especially if they treat markedly different kinds of patients. In addition, a surgical group may practice at more than one hospital, and more than one surgical group may practice at a given hospital.

STS publishes only group and/or hospital-level data for which the participant correctly submitted the required data for score and star rating analysis. Surgery groups and/or hospitals that did not meet established data completeness thresholds during the reporting time period do not receive scores and star ratings and, therefore, are not publicly reported.