General Thoracic Surgery Public Reporting

The STS General Thoracic Surgery Database (GTSD) contains information on surgical procedures submitted by participants—most often a hospital cardiothoracic surgery department or cardiothoracic surgery group at one or more hospitals; in some instances, a participant may be an individual surgeon.

STS publicly reports participant results for lobectomy for lung cancer and esophagectomy. STS Public Reporting is limited to participants in the US and Canada.

Lobectomy for lung cancer outcomes for GTSD participants are better than national averages. Thus, for the purposes of public reporting, STS believes it is appropriate to present a comparison of GTSD and national outcomes to demonstrate the high performance of GTSD participants.  

STS selected the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) as a comparator database to best represent national outcomes. Maintained by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the NIS is the largest all-payer inpatient database available in the United States and represents a 20% stratified sample of all hospital discharges from nonfederal facilities. The NIS database includes approximately 8 million inpatient hospital discharge abstracts collected annually for patients of all ages and all sources of insurance. Each discharge record includes a weight that represents the relative proportion of the total US hospital patient population accounted for by that record. This dataset is broadly representative of individuals in the US population who were hospitalized during a given year and is the most generalizable data to represent national lung cancer resection outcomes. 

NOTE: Results are based on a participant’s unique group of patients (known as case mix) and the number of surgical procedures in each category. Results and star ratings published are specific to the participant listed and are not intended for direct comparison to other participants.