Blue Book Online for SCTS

The challenge

The Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery in Great Britain and Ireland (SCTS) have been collecting and publishing surgery outcomes since 2005 and were keen to open up their work to public scrutiny. However, the data they collated on an annual basis was not easily accessible. The material was compiled annually into “The Blue Book”, a substantial hardback book. SCTS approached NWEH to create two websites to support the sharing of information between patients and clinicians to support improvements in care.

The solution

Working with the lead clinicians and information teams of SCTS, NICOR and MAHSC, NWEH developed a web-enabled system with two views: one for patients and one for clinicians and governance teams. The sites went live in late summer 2013 and have had their first annual update. NWEH continues to provide support for SCTS, such as implementing regular updates to the dataset.

The outcome

The Blue Book Online provides access to the results of the UK National Cardiac Surgery Audit, including how many operations are carried out each year and the outcomes of those operations. The website provides interactive graphs allowing the visitor to look at changes over time and understand the impact of different risk factors such as age, gender and other medical conditions on the outcomes of surgery. The SCTS Governance Reporting Tool is a website for cardiac surgeons. It allows them to create detailed reports about their own performance as well as the performance of their hospital. The reports use a mixture of statistics and graphs to illustrate their changing results over time and lets them compare their outcomes against national results. NWEH delivered the applications on time and on budget and continues to provide service support for both applications.

“The quality of the process, scientific rigour and deliverables, has been outstanding.”
Mr Ben Bridgewater, Consultant Cardiac Surgeon, Clinical Lead for Adult Cardiac Surgery at the National Institute for Clinical Outcomes Research at UCL, Director of Outcomes Publication for HQIP