The EACTS Adult Cardiac Database — an interview with Jan Gummert
The EACTS Adult Cardiac Database (ACD) is a collaborative registry and benchmarking tool for cardiac surgical data. It analyses and benchmarks cardiac data on an international scale, giving surgical teams the advanced data tools and insights to continually improve outcomes for patients.
We sat down with Professor Jan Gummert, who was involved with the development of the first iteration of the database, to hear more about what prompted the development of the new and improved ACD and why hospitals should sign up.
Jan is Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery for the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the Heart and Diabetes Center at NRW Ruhr, the largest university hospital Germany. His major interest is minimal invasive cardiac surgery, as well as heart transplantation and ventricular assist devices and total artificial hearts. Treating 40,500 patients per year, the Heart and Diabetes Centre is known as the largest heart transplant centre in Germany.
Jan’s interest in the database stems from his commitment to open and transparent data in medicine. His centre has published their data for the past 15 years, and he talked to us about the benefits of doing so to the cardiac surgery community, and ultimately to patients.
You were involved in the development of the original EACTS Adult Cardiac Database. What was that database like and why have efforts been made to develop it?
My work with the initial version of the EACTS Adult Cardiac database began in 2004. The database was useful, but the quality of data displayed within countries and between countries was not always consistent. This made it challenging at times to find data sets that could be used for effective benchmarking. The previous version was just the beginning, so I am excited about the launch of this new and improved version.
How is the new database different from the previous version?
For the new and improved ACD we have focused on having consistent and standardised data collection from different sources, which will mean the data can be used very effectively to improve patient care.
The standardisation of data will be made possible by the Adult Cardiac Database Data Dictionary. The dictionary is a valuable resource developed with existing dictionaries from across Europe in mind and is designed to help clinicians, researchers, and healthcare professionals standardise data recording across hospitals, promoting consistent and efficient cardiac care.
With the new database it’s easier to export data too, and the data fields are all defined in a more helpful way, which means the data can be used for scientific as well as clinical purposes.
Ultimately, we hope these improvements will mean the database comes to represent the gold standard for cardiac surgery databases globally.
What is the biggest benefit the new database will offer?
Because the ACD will eventually hold data from so many different hospitals, it will be possible to compare your service with that of many others, and benchmark your own surgical practice and quality. This is a really important benefit of ACD as it will help hospitals around the world deliver better patient care. By looking at data from so many other centres it gives us all the opportunity to ask, ‘What can I improve?’
For me, this is the most important incentive to sign up – the ACD offers a real opportunity to improve the quality of your centre, the quality of your treatment and help more patients.
What else can people expect to get from the database?
We can use the database to make some interesting comparisons between different healthcare systems, looking at patient outcomes and learning from one another. With the database you can look at length of stays, mortality rates, co-morbidities and more, across different countries and healthcare systems. You can look at what’s working in other places and adapt your own practice as a result. The potential for scientific use of the data is really exciting. Researchers can request access to the data – as long as there is a clear patient benefit – and use it to inform their work. The more centres that sign up and share their data, the more powerful the dataset will be, and the greater the benefit to the scientific community.
How would you like to see the new database develop?
My long-term ambition for the ACD is to see it being used as a National Registry database by countries throughout Europe. For that to happen, all hospitals in a specific country would need to join, and the ACD could then eventually become their national database. If this were to happen, once we had several countries using it as a national database we would be able to benchmark internationally, which would help improve the quality of surgery and patient outcomes on a much larger scale. This would take time, and depend on many centres signing up, but I hope to see it happen eventually.
Who should be signing up to be part of the Adult Cardiac database?
Having access to quality data gives us all the opportunity to improve the quality of our centres. Anyone working in cardiac surgery who wants to compare and benchmark their hospital data internationally, get bespoke reports with analysis of their hospital’s data, or access data for their research has something to gain from signing up. I hope that centres and national registries across Europe sign up, use the data and insights to advance their surgical practice, and improve outcomes for their patients.
Professor Jan Gummert is Director of the Clinic for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the Heart and Diabetes Center NRW, Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, University Hospital of the Ruhr University Bochum and Medical Faculty OWL (University of Bielefeld).