Louis, James D. St.

Purpose We reviewed all 64 articles ever published by The Congenital Heart Surgeons’ Society (CHSS) Data Center to estimate the academic impact of these peer-reviewed articles. Materials and Methods The Congenital Heart Surgeons’ Society has performed research based on 12 Diagnostic Inception Cohorts. The first cohort (Transposition) began enrolling patients on January 1, 1985. We queried PubMed to determine the number of publications that referenced each of the 64 journal articles generated by the datasets of the 12 Diagnostic Inception Cohorts that comprise the CHSS Database. Descriptive summaries of the data were tabulated using mean with standard deviation and median with range. Results Sixty-four peer-reviewed papers have been published based on the CHSS Database. Fifty-nine peer-reviewed articles have been published based on the 12 Diagnostic Inception Cohorts, and five additional articles have been published based on Data Science. Excluding the recently established Diagnostic Inception Cohort for patients with Ebstein malformation of tricuspid valve, the number of papers published per cohort ranged from 1 for coarctation to 11 for transposition of the great arteries. The 11 articles generated from the CHSS Transposition Cohort were referenced by a total of 111 articles (median number of references per journal article = 9 [range = 0-22, mean = 10.1]). Overall, individual articles were cited by an average of 11 (mean), and a maximum of 41 PubMed-listed publications. Overall, these 64 peer-reviewed articles based on the CHSS Database were cited 692 times in PubMed-listed publications. The first CHSS peer-reviewed article was published in 1987, and during the 35 years from 1987 to 2022, inclusive, the annual number of CHSS publications has ranged from 0 to 7, with a mean of 1.8 publications per year (median = 1, mode = 1). Conclusion Congenital Heart Surgeons’ Society studies are widely referenced in the pediatric cardiac surgical literature, with over 10 citations per published article. These cohorts provide unique information unavailable in other sources of data. A tool to access this analysis is available at: [ https://data-center.chss.org/multimedia/files/2022/CAI.pdf ].

Care and outcomes for the more than 40,000 patients undergoing pediatric and congenital heart surgery in the United States annually are known to vary widely. While consensus recommendations have been published across numerous fields as one mechanism to promote a high level of care delivery across centers, it has been more than two decades since the last pediatric heart surgery recommendations were published in the United States. More recent guidance is lacking, and collaborative efforts involving the many disciplines engaged in caring for these children have not been undertaken to date. The present initiative brings together professional societies spanning numerous care domains and congenital cardiac surgeons, pediatric cardiologists, nursing, and other healthcare professionals from diverse programs around the country to develop consensus recommendations for United States centers. The focus of this initial work is on pediatric heart surgery, and it is recommended that future efforts focus in detail on the adult congenital population. We describe the background, rationale, and methodology related to this collaborative effort, and recommendations put forth for Essential Care Centers (essential services necessary for any program), and Comprehensive Care Centers (services to optimize comprehensive and high-complexity care), encompassing structure, process, and outcome metrics across 14 domains.

The optimal training of the highly specialized congenital heart surgeon is a long and complex process, which is a significant challenge in most parts of the world. The World Society for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Surgery (WSPCHS) has established the Global Council on Education for Congenital Heart Surgery as a nonprofit organization with the goal of assessing current training and certification and ultimately establishing standardized criteria for the training, evaluation, and certification of congenital heart surgeons around the world. The Global Council and the WSPCHS have reviewed the present status of training and certification for congenital cardiac surgery around the world. There is currently lack of consensus and standardized criteria for training in congenital heart surgery, with significant disparity between continents and countries. This represents significant obstacles to international job mobility of competent congenital heart surgeons and to the efforts to improve the quality of care for patients with Congenital Heart Disease worldwide. The purpose of this article is to summarize and document the present state of training and certification in congenital heart surgery around the world.

Objectives: STAT Mortality Categories (developed 2009) stratify congenital heart surgery procedures into groups of increasing mortality risk to characterize case mix of congenital heart surgery providers. This update of the STAT Mortality Score and Categories is empirically based for all procedures and reflects contemporary outcomes. Methods: Cardiovascular surgical operations in the Society of Thoracic Surgeons Congenital Heart Surgery Database (January 1, 2010 – June 30, 2017) were analyzed. In this STAT 2020 Update of the STAT Mortality Score and Categories, the risk associated with a specific combination of procedures was estimated under the assumption that risk is determined by the highest risk individual component procedure. Operations composed of multiple component procedures were eligible for unique STAT Scores when the statistically estimated mortality risk differed from that of the highest risk component procedure. Bayesian modeling accounted for small denominators. Risk estimates were rescaled to STAT 2020 Scores between 0.1 and 5.0. STAT 2020 Category assignment was designed to minimize within-category variation and maximize between-category variation. Results: Among 161,351 operations at 110 centers (19,090 distinct procedure combinations), 235 types of single or multiple component operations received unique STAT 2020 Scores. Assignment to Categories resulted in the following distribution: STAT 2020 Category 1 includes 59 procedure codes with model-based estimated mortality 0.2% to 1.3%; Category 2 includes 73 procedure codes with mortality estimates 1.4% to 2.9%; Category 3 includes 46 procedure codes with mortality estimates 3.0% to 6.8%; Category 4 includes 37 procedure codes with mortality estimates 6.9% to 13.0%; and Category 5 includes 17 procedure codes with mortality estimates 13.5% to 38.7%. The number of procedure codes with empirically derived Scores has grown by 58% (235 in STAT 2020 vs 148 in STAT 2009). Of the 148 procedure codes with empirically derived Scores in 2009, approximately one-half have changed STAT Category relative to 2009 metrics. The New STAT 2020 Scores and Categories demonstrated good discrimination for predicting mortality in an independent validation sample (July 1, 2017-June 30, 2019; sample size 46,933 operations at 108 centers) with C-statistic = 0.791 for STAT 2020 Score and 0.779 for STAT 2020 Category. Conclusions: The updated STAT metrics reflect contemporary practice and outcomes. New empirically based STAT 2020 Scores and Category designations are assigned to a larger set of procedure codes, while accounting for risk associated with multiple component operations. Updating STAT metrics based on contemporary outcomes facilitates accurate assessment of case mix.

As recovery of congenital heart surgery programs begins during this COVID-19 pandemic, we review key considerations such as screening, protection of patients and health care workers (HCWs), case prioritization, barriers to reactivation, redesign of patient care teams, contribution of telemedicine, modification of trainees’ experiences, preparation for potential resurgence, and strategies to maintain HCW wellness. COVID-19 has tested the resolve and grit of our specialty and we have an opportunity to emerge more refined.

The World Society for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Surgery (WSPCHS) is the largest professional organization in the world dedicated to pediatric and congenital heart surgery. The purpose of this article is to document the first decade of the history of WSPCHS from its formation in 2006, to summarize the current status of WSPCHS, and to consider the future of WSPCHS. The WSPCHS was incorporated in Canada on April 7, 2011, with a head office in Montreal, Canada. The vision of the WSPCHS is that every child born anywhere in the world with a congenital heart defect should have access to appropriate medical and surgical care. The mission of the WSPCHS is to promote the highest quality comprehensive cardiac care to all patients with congenital heart disease, from the fetus to the adult, regardless of the patient’s economic means, with an emphasis on excellence in teaching, research, and community service.