Cardiac Surgery Outcomes by Surgeon and Hospital

Cardiac surgery performance data includes case counts, observed and expected mortality rates, and risk-adjusted mortality rates for individual surgeons and hospitals in New York State. The dataset is produced by health.data.ny.gov and contains records for patients discharged between 2008 and 2010, with subsequent years appended. Physician-level data is reported for surgeons performing 200 or more procedures over three years or at least one surgery in each year.

Use Cases

• Benchmark individual surgeon performance by comparing Observed Mortality Rate against Expected Mortality Rate and Risk-Adjusted Mortality Rate.
• Analyze regional disparities in cardiac surgery outcomes by grouping data by Region or Detailed Region and comparing Number of Deaths per Number of Cases.
• Identify hospitals with outlier mortality rates by examining Facility ID and Hospital Name against the Upper Limit of Confidence Interval and Lower Limit of Confidence Interval.
• Track surgeon activity and case volume over time using Physician Name, National Provider ID, Year of Hospital Discharge, and Number of Cases.
• Study the association between specific Procedure types (e.g., Coronary Artery Bypass Graft) and mortality outcomes using Observed Mortality Rate and Number of Deaths.

Strengths

• Includes risk-adjusted metrics such as Risk-Adjusted Mortality Rate and confidence intervals for statistical comparison.
• Provides surgeon-level detail with over 15 columns including Physician Name, License Number, and Procedure.
• Covers a multi-year period from 2008 through 2010 with planned annual updates.

Limitations

• Surgeon-level data is only reported for high-volume surgeons (200+ procedures over 3 years), excluding lower-volume providers.
• Geographic coverage is limited to hospitals in New York State, as indicated by the Region column.
• Initial data is from 2008-2010, which may be stale for contemporary analysis without more recent appended years.

Provenance

Source

health.data.ny.gov

Collection Method

Administrative data from hospital discharges reported to the New York State Department of Health.

Time Range

2008-2010, with subsequent years appended.

Freshness

Updated annually, with last update recorded in March 2025.

Geography

Hospitals within New York State, USA.