General Thoracic Surgery Public Reporting

STS publicly reports STS National Database participant outcomes and star ratings for lobectomy for lung cancer and, as of summer 2019, esophagectomy.

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.