Society of Thoracic Surgeons

Site Description

As a national leader in health care transparency and accountability, The Society of Thoracic Surgeons believes that the public has a right to know the quality of surgical outcomes. To further this goal, the Society has established the STS Public Reporting initiative, which allows participants in the STS National Database to voluntarily report their surgical outcomes to the public on the STS website.

Project Goals

The goal of this project is to improve the visual representation of some of the reports on the public reporting site to better convey the quality of the surgical outcomes it reports. Specifically many of the metrics will be enhanced to show the expected range of results, and where the indicator is compared to that range.

Measure of success

When this work is complete, the site will store and display data indicators that include the range of expected values, along with the specific value for this indicator.

Scope for this project

1. Plan, present, and explore alternative data presentations
2. Update the data model to support the necessary field storage (how the extra range information gets stored in the database)
3. Update theme templates to render in the desired chart/widget style (the visual look of the widget for end users)
4. Update data import scripts to accommodate the changes to the field storage and allow bulk loading the new data elements
5. The data presentations for adult cardiac and general thoracic pages will be updated to match the changes made for congenital. Adult Cardiac and General Thoracic pages will continue to have stars, and the NIS bar graph will remain for thoracic. Congenital will continue to not have stars.
6. Cleanup of existing congenital, adult, and thoracic data sets.
7. Enhance search filters to include participant name, city, state, and other fields identified.
8. Remove hospital-level reporting for adult cardiac and switch congenital reporting from hospital-level to participant-level reporting.
9. Testing/QA on all major browsers - latest two versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, mobile Chrome, mobile Safari
10. Project Management
11. Deployment and release