The Recovery Room 017: "A Watershed Moment for Health Care Accountability"

Segment 1: Pulling Back The Curtain
Guest: Dr. David Shahian, Chair of Society of Thoracic Surgeons' Quality Management Taskforce

If you need heart bypass surgery, would it help to know that one surgical group has a 24 percent chance of providing recommended drugs when you leave the hospital versus another surgical group that provides the drugs 92 percent of the time?

Thanks to data released by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons to Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, it's possible to compare surgical groups for the very first time. The ratings of 221 surgical groups - but not individual surgeons - from 42 states are currently available to subscribers of Consumer Reports on the magazine's website. The information will be available to the public on the Society's website in a couple of months. The scores assigned by Consumer Reports are based on complication and survival rates, whether the groups used the best surgical technique and whether patients are sent home with medicine that has been proven to be beneficial after heart surgery. Surgical groups were assigned a rating of one to three stars - above average, average, or below average.  

This publication of surgical group ratings is a significant first step toward industry transparency; but it's a tentative one. Of the thousand-plus cardiac surgery groups in the country, 90% submit performance data to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons; but only about a quarter of them allowed their results to be published. And only five of the 221 surgical groups reviewed by Consumer Reports received a below average rating.

Even before their decision to allow the publication of surgical group ratings, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons - or STS - had earned a reputation as an industry leader in the collection of performance and outcomes data. It's been tracking its member surgeons' performance for over twenty years.

Segment 2: The Reputation
Guest: Dr. John Santa. Director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center

According to Dave Shahian, it was the reputation of Consumer Reports that allowed the Society of Thoracic Surgeons to make its groundbreaking release of performance data. We wanted to take a look behind the scenes at the magazine, so we invited John Santa to join us. Dr. Santa is the Director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center in Yonkers, NY.