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For the past two years, leaders of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) have been hard at work developing a novel and transformative 21st century Quality Assessment Program for the cardiothoracic surgical community, in response to widely recognized challenges with historical platforms. It became clear as we listened to surgeons and data managers that the best way forward would be to build from the ground up, and that’s exactly what we are doing.

Built on an Open Source, Cloud-based platform, the AATS Quality Assessment Program ensures you will never need to enter your data into another costly, and closed system ever again. With customizable dashboards and advanced data visualization, you will always be able to access your data whenever and however you want it.

The AATS Quality Assessment Program brings your data to the web in real-time, and with rapid feedback. Featuring new tools to allow you to collaborate and share best practice ideas in a single web-based ecosystem, the AATS has built a platform that will save you time and money, and most importantly, help you deliver better information and care to your patients:

• Building on the HubZero open source software platform, the AATS Quality Assessment Program will give your hospital or physician practice one cohesive database for all specialties, adult cardiac, thoracic, congenital, and structural, for just one simple annual fee. If you also participate in state reporting, we are developing modules for automatic entry. No additional vendors will be required, and no additional fees will be charged.
• Our platform will deliver 21st century risk adjustment models using machine learning developed in collaboration with the UCSD Supercomputing Center.
• We are reducing data collection times with a modern dataset based on quality. We will require 90% less fields than historical databases. Artificial Intelligence will help efficiently capture current data from more existing systems and reduce the time it takes to enter your data.
• Immediate 24 hour/7 day a week access to your latest data will be provided, as well as aggregated national and international data.

Hypothetical collaboration for recognized excess strokes for CABG and valve procedures. Web mockup by HUBZero. A, Data display. Blue box highlights the excess strokes. Within the highlighted area is an icon that will link to my peer quality discussion group. B, Dialog with my quality peer discussion group about my excess strokes. CABG, Coronary artery bypass grafting; O/E, observed/expected.

Blackstone EH, Swain J, McCardle K, Adams DH; Governance Committee, American Association for Thoracic Surgery Quality Assessment Program. A comprehensive American Association for Thoracic Surgery quality program for the 21st century. J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg. 2019 Oct;158(4):1120-1126.

Our ambition for our new Quality Assessment Program is detailed in this month’s Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. Members of our core leadership team include:

Dr. David H. Adams (Chair)
David H. Adams, MD, is the immediate past-president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and currently serves as President of the AATS Foundation. He is the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Cardiac Surgeon-in-Chief of the Mount Sinai Health System.

Dr. Eugene Blackstone
Eugene H. Blackstone, MD, full-time Head, Clinical Investigations, Heart and Vascular Institute (HVI), Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Blackstone is statistical editor of the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. He has led efforts in machine learning since the mid-1980s and artificial intelligence for medical database architecture since the early 1990s.

Ken McCardle, MS
Ken McCardle, MS, is Vice President, Clinical Operations at the Mount Sinai Health System. Ken and his team of 50 oversee the health system’s quality data sets and clinical databases. Ken is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health Science and Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Rick Mouser
Recently hired as the AQAP Administrative Director with AATS. He has recently served as Business Development Director at HubZero, and is an experienced manager, helping PI's with N.S.F. and N.I.H. funding build web platforms for data management projects.

Dr. Jeffrey Rich
Dr. Jeffrey Rich is a past president of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. He is Chairman of Operations and Strategy for the Cleveland Clinic’s Miller Family Heart & Vascular Institute. He directed the Center for Medicare Management, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the National Quality Forum.

Dr. Julie Swain
Julie Swain, MD, is Vice Chair for Clinical Performance for the Mount Sinai Health System and Director of the Center for Medical Devices (CMeD) at Mount Sinai Heart. In addition, she serves as Professor of Cardiovascular Surgery and Director of Clinical Research in the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Surgeons and data managers like you have helped shape the need for and logic behind the AATS Quality Assessment Program. Now we need your help to refine the user experience of a platform that's built for and by our surgical community. Pilot sites are already contributing data, and we are finalizing initial pilot sites now. There are many benefits for early participation and we hope you will let us know if you are ready to learn more by visit aats.org/aqap.