Heart surgery ratings
It's sad but true that it's easier to make an informed choice about cars and refrigerators than it is about health-care providers. To help correct that problem, we’ve teamed with the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) to publish ratings of heart-surgery groups based on their performance data for bypass surgery. Using this information, consumers can see how surgical groups compare with national benchmarks for overall performance, survival, complications, and other measures.
No organization is better poised to provide this snapshot of surgical outcomes than the STS, a nonprofit organization that represents some 5,400 surgeons worldwide who operate on the thorax, or chest. Its Adult Cardiac Surgery Database includes more than 4 million surgical records and covers roughly 90 percent of the more than 1,100 surgical groups in the U.S. that perform cardiac surgery, making it the largest such registry in the world. Participating groups add data four times a year, providing an up-to-date picture of their surgical practice.
The three-star rating system (available to subscribers) draws on this extensive database to show how well surgical groups performed in terms of survival rates, the absence of complications, and other key measures. Groups that score above average receive three stars, average performers get two stars, and those that are below average get one. Because the average performance of surgical groups has increased substantially in the past two decades, it’s possible to get very good care even from many two-star practices.
These ratings include only those groups that have agreed to let us publish their performance results. That includes 323 groups from 44 states, plus the District of Columbia. Eighty-one of those groups received three stars for their overall performance, 237 got two stars, and five got one star. We will periodically update the ratings with data from additional groups that agree to release their information to us.
In the meantime, if you are considering bypass surgery with a group that is not in the ratings, you should still ask for its results. That's because most surgical groups that have not yet agreed to share data with us do participate in the STS database. And they should be willing to provide those results to you. In fact, our medical experts say that if a group can't share that information—or won't—you should consider looking for a different one.
Our report also provides advice from our experts on treating heart disease, including basic medical management that every heart-disease patient should have as well as less-invasive alternatives to standard bypass surgery that might make sense for some people.
