International Quality Improvement Collaborative for Congenital Heart Surgery

Global Project Lead: Boston Children’s Hospital (Unfunded)

The International Quality Improvement Collaborative (IQIC) for Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) is an initiative to collect and assess benchmarking data for congenital heart surgery in the developing world, with the overall goal of guiding quality improvement efforts and reducing mortality for CHD. IQIC was launched in 2008 by Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard University and there are currently over 70 sites in more than 25 different countries enrolled. Sites submit diagnostic, procedural, and clinical information into a centralised repository using a web-based data entry platform. Evaluation of surgical outcomes and risk-adjusted mortality rates are used as benchmarks for comparison with other participating sites. Our unit joined this initiative in 2017 and the database is managed by Dr Swanson who collects and enters the required clinical information with the assistance of Mr Cameron Hendricks.