Clinical Excellence Awards and Reports
Choosing a qualified hospital can be a daunting task, especially with the added burden of illness. Healthcare consumers are bombarded by the media with articles and reports touting excellent and innovative care provided by hospitals nationwide. But how do consumers determine which healthcare provider will truly meet their critical and diverse needs? Evidence-based clinical awards for cardiac care and outcome reports provide objective numerical proof as opposed to subjective and potentially self-serving accolades. "The proof is in the pudding," and our clinical awards and outcome reports provide true reflections of quality and value that other, less factual reporting methods may not.
Clinical Excellence Awards
We at the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine know that every patient is unique and deserving of the best possible care, and our evidence-based clinical awards for cardiac care consistently reflect our dedication to exceeding national standards of excellence as well as our commitment to best serve our patients.
Surgical Outcome Reports
In an effort to improve the quality of healthcare, California hospitals are required by law to submit data on all isolated coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) procedures, which is analyzed to publicly report on measures of CABG surgery quality. Such measures include operative mortality (deaths as a result of surgery), risk-adjusted mortality rate (a measure of the mortality rate for an individual hospital compared to the average of a larger group of hospitals), and case volumes (number of procedures performed per year).
In addition, Stanford strives to closely monitor its outcome data for the other complex surgical procedures performed and voluntarily submits its clinical surgical data to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) National Adult Cardiac Surgery Database. This allows the surgical team to continually compare outcomes on all types of surgical procedures with hospitals nationwide. The combination of clinical data collected and STS national outcome reports is used to continually monitor performance and drive opportunities for outcomes improvement.
Together, these statistics are compiled in report form to assist healthcare consumers, referring physicians, and healthcare insurers compare and choose the most qualified hospitals based upon their surgical needs.
The reports presented below compare the outcomes of various procedures performed at Stanford Health Care (SHC) to that of the national averages as reported by the STS. Unless noted otherwise, this data is risk adjusted, meaning it takes into account the preoperative risk factors and co-morbidities of a specific hospital and patient, and then compares outcomes between the performance of the hospital and that of the national average. This risk-adjustment method levels the playing field for a valid comparison between hospitals regardless of the severity of the patients they treat.