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.

Mass-DAC study participants are protected by a Certificate of Confidentiality issued by the United States Government.