STS - sporedata/researchdesigneR GitHub Wiki
General description
The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) National Database is a database that encompasses specifically detailed, clinically relevant preoperative and intraoperative patient-level characteristics.
The STS database is a voluntary clinical registry that combines four components, each focusing on a separate type of cardiothoracic surgery (adult cardiac surgery, congenital heart surgery, general thoracic surgery, and patients undergoing treatment for advanced heart failure). The data are collected at each site from the medical record into a standardized data collection form, ensuring the reliability and validity of the data.
Variable categories
- Demographic information;
- Specialty-specific complications, postoperative length of stay, and 30-day readmission;
- Short-term outcomes such as morbidity, mortality, and length of stay;
- Granular specialty-specific covariates. For instance, information on functional status, pulmonary function test results, and variables describing the method to determine the clinical stage.
Limitations
- STS has a procedure-based (rather than disease-based) nature of the database;
- Absence of clinician-level characteristics;
- Absence of long-term outcomes;
- Absence of patient-reported outcomes;
- Possible limited generalizability.