WVU Medicine Thoracic Surgery Program receives top scores for esophagectomy procedure
The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) has awarded WVU Medicine’s Thoracic Surgery Program with three stars, the highest possible rating, for esophagectomy, the surgical removal of all or parts of the esophagus.
The STS star rating system is one of the most sophisticated and highly regarded overall measures of quality in healthcare, rating the benchmarked outcomes of cardiothoracic surgery programs in the United States and Canada. The three-star rating, which denotes the highest category of quality, places WVU Medicine among the elite for esophagectomy in the United States and Canada.
“We have a very patient-centered, state-of-the-art, comprehensive esophageal cancer program, where a multidisciplinary expert panel provides the best care,” Ghulam Abbas, MD, chief of the Division of Thoracic Surgery at the WVU Heart and Vascular Institute and director of surgical thoracic oncology at the WVU Cancer Institute, said. “We have one of the busiest endoscopic and robotic esophagectomy program in the region.”
Star ratings are listed in the General Thoracic Surgery Database (GTSD) star and are derived by testing whether the participant’s composite or domain score is significantly different from the overall STS average for lobectomy for lung cancer or esophagectomy performed by GTSD participants.
STS General Thoracic Surgery Public Reporting offers a comparison of GTSD and national outcomes, demonstrating the high performance of GTSD participants.
The STS National Database was established in 1989 as an initiative for quality improvement and patient safety among cardiothoracic surgeons. The Database includes four components: the Adult Cardiac Surgery Database (ACSD), the Congenital Heart Surgery Database (CHSD), the GTSD, and the mechanical circulatory support database (Intermacs).
The GTSD — the largest and most robust clinical thoracic surgical database in the United States and Canada — contains more than 616,000 general thoracic surgery procedure records and has approximately 1,000 participating physicians. Almost 35 percent of GTSD participants are currently enrolled in public reporting.