Methodist Hospital has earned a distinguished three-star rating from The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) for its patient care and outcomes in isolated coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) procedures. The three-star rating, which denotes the highest category of quality, places Methodist Hospital among the elite for heart bypass surgery in the United States and Canada.
“At Methodist Hospital, our comprehensive heart program has a long-standing reputation of providing the highest quality of care coupled with the most advanced technologies and lifesaving cardiac interventions,” said Fernando Triana, MD, Physician Director of Cardiac, Vascular, Pulmonary, and Thoracic Service Lines. “This elite rating is a testament to our entire multidisciplinary team’s commitment to providing the best in heart care to our community.”
The STS star rating system is one of the most sophisticated and highly regarded overall measures of quality in health care, rating the benchmarked outcomes of cardiothoracic surgery programs across the United States and Canada. The star rating is calculated using a combination of quality measures for specific procedures performed by an STS Adult Cardiac Surgery Database participant. Approximately twenty percent of participants receive a three-star rating for isolated CABG surgery. The latest analysis of data for CABG surgery covers a 3-year period, from July 2019 to June 2022.
“Less than five percent of cardiovascular surgical programs achieve a three-star rating,” commented Allen Baum, MD, Quality Chair of the Cardiovascular Division for Methodist Hospital. “This is the highest achievement a hospital can receive, and it does not happen by accident. We have a defined process for our multidisciplinary team to determine the best plan of care for each patient that comes to Methodist Hospital requiring heart surgery. What is even more remarkable is that Methodist Hospital has the largest number of patient admissions in Texas and performs the highest acuity surgery in South Texas.”
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 General Thoracic Surgery Database (GTSD), and the mechanical circulatory support database (Intermacs). The STS ACSD houses approximately 6.9 million surgical records and gathers information from more than 3,800 participating physicians, including surgeons and anesthesiologists from more than 90% of groups that perform heart surgery in the US. STS public reporting online enables STS ACSD participants to voluntarily report to each other and the public their heart surgery scores and star ratings.
