General Thoracic Surgery Public Reporting

Lung cancer resection outcomes for General Thoracic Surgery Database (GTSD) participants are better than national averages^[1]. Thus, for the purposes of general thoracic 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. The NIS is the largest, all-payer inpatient database available in the United States, representing a 20% stratified sample of all hospital discharges from nonfederal facilities^[2]. This database is maintained by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. It includes approximately 8 million in-patient 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^[3]. This dataset is broadly representative of individuals in the US population who were hospitalized in a given year and is the most generalizable data to represent national lung cancer resection outcomes.