Massachusetts enacted legislation in 2000
establishing that a cardiac care quality advisory commission “develop
standards and criteria to be used by the department of public
health for the purpose of collecting, monitoring and validating
patient specific outcome data for all hospitals in the commonwealth
that perform open heart surgery or angioplasty.” Following
a 2001 report filed by the Massachusetts Cardiac Care Quality
Commission, the State legislature mandated the Massachusetts Department
of Public Health collect patient specific outcome data, and evaluate
all surgery and angioplasty programs in the Commonwealth. Regulations
were passed in April 2002 requiring all Massachusetts hospitals
providing cardiac surgery and/or angioplasty to collect patient
data using the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) National Cardiac
Surgery Database Instrument, in the case of cardiac surgery, and
the American College of Cardiology’s (ACC) National Cardiovascular
Data Registry (NCDR) Instrument, in the case of coronary intervention
procedures. All data are submitted
electronically to the Massachusetts Data Analysis Center (Mass-DAC),
the data-coordinating center that is under the direction of Sharon-Lise
Normand and located in the Department of Health Care Policy at
Harvard Medical School. Mass-DAC is advised by an external Cardiac
Advisory Committee. In addition to the data submissions to Mass-DAC,
hospitals are required to submit data to the national STS and
ACC data registries. Implementation of data collection for cardiac
surgery began January 1, 2002. Implementation of data collection
for coronary interventions using the ACC-NCDR Instrument began
April 1, 2003.
