Outcomes research using a voluntary generic registry

The Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium is a cooperative program developed to assess the quality of care being given to pediatric patients with congenital heart disease. The participating hospitals pool their clinical information to allow statistically meaningful analyses and comparisons. A method has been developed to allow centers to compare operative mortality in a way that takes operative risk factors into account. The Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium has developed an acceptable standard of care models in pediatric cardiology, established a method for translating clinical data into useful practise information for evaluating services, and served as a model for other outcome analysis programs.