The Austrian Cardiac Project had the task of creating an Austria-wide heart register system consisting of a central database and distributed clients that would gather and analyse the data. Under the leadership of the corresponding author, the basis for this was constructed during the period November 2004 to February 2006. Since March 2007, the system is in use in 2/3 of all the Austrian hospitals where cardiac surgical interventions are performed. The Cardiac Project was carried out with the financial support of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and the Tyrolean Future Foundation, supported under the competence centre hitt – health information technologies tirol.
Published in Chapter:
Model Based Decision Making in Cardiac Surgery
Oskar Staudinger (University for Health Sciences, Med Informatics and Tech, Austria), Bettina Staudinger (University for Health Sciences, Med Informatics and Tech, Austria), Herwig Ostermann (University for Health Sciences, Med Informatics and Tech, Austria), Martin Grabenwöger (University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria), and Bernhard Tilg (University for Health Sciences, Med Informatics and Tech, Austria)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 12
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-881-9.ch094
Abstract
The development of models for risk stratification in cardiac surgery goes back a number of years. In 1989, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) created the first database version for use in the USA. In the year 2005 alone, the data from 234,532 operations were recorded in a structured way by 654 participating institutes. The value of these collected data is described by Ferguson (Ferguson, Dziuban, Edwards, Eiken, Shroyer, & Pairolero, 2000): “Because of their collective efforts, the goal to establish the STS National Data Base as a ‘gold standard’ worldwide for process and outcomes analysis related to cardiothoracic surgery is becoming a reality.” The number of research projects deriving from this is correspondingly large (The Society of Thoracic Surgeons National Database Access and Publications Task Force, 2006).