Putting the Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium in Context

Collaborative multi-institutional clinical registries are critical in pediatric cardiology, with its diverse diagnoses and procedures and relatively low event rates.1,2 Founded in 1982 to support quality improvement,3 the Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium (PCCC) contains clinical information on over 137 000 patients (through 2007). Centers participate voluntarily and membership has varied over time; of the 57 PCCC centers, 35 have contributed at least 10 years of data.Analyses of PCCC data have contributed to an understanding of cardiac surgical outcomes in children (see online-only Data Supplement Table I).4 Centers of the size range represented in the PCCC (< 500 operations/year) may vary systematically in their case mix relative to larger centers. To provide context for outcomes research reports from the PCCC, we analyzed (1) how the case mix at PCCC centers compares with that in published …