The groundbreaking Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium (PCCC) and a historical perspective of pediatric cardiology will be discussed during today's Dan G. McNamara Lecture. The keynote speaker, James H. Moller, MD, will look back over a quarter century of the PCCC's work to improve outcomes in children with congenital heart disease.

"It's been a long journey, and this is the first time we've discussed the data as a whole," says Moller. From 1982 to 2008, the PCCC collected data to form an unparalleled database with input from 52 centers in the U.S. and Canada. The PCCC is a registry of cardiac catheterizations, surgical operations, and autopsies performed for infants, children and adults with congenital heart disease.

His talk, "Using Data to Improve Quality: The Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium," will take place from 10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. in room 31C, and will explain the principles behind creating the database and will demonstrate how the PCCC adjusted for differences in the characteristics of each center's patients. "We collected data from many small centers in the Midwest, which was somewhat unusual," he explains. More than 137,000 patients are included.

Analyzing registry outcomes promotes ongoing quality improvement in cardiac centers, and Moller will discuss specific examples where the data has been tailored and used to improve outcomes in pediatric patients. "Over the years, each center was given detailed reports to review its own data and compare it to the overall group," Moller notes.

He adds that now that data collection has ended, the PCCC's focus has shifted toward a long-term view. "We are [now] comparing the registry data to the National Death Index, with an eye on identifying late deaths in PCCC patients," Moller says.

Keywords: Autopsy, Cardiac Catheterization, Child, Data Collection, Heart Defects, Congenital, Infant, Quality Improvement, Registries, ACC Annual Scientific Session

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