The development of an international surgical registry: the ECSUR project. The European Cardiac Surgical Registry.
OBJECTIVE
Cardiac surgery is the first of any therapeutic discipline to attempt to establish a major international registry on a patient-by-patient basis. Being the first necessarily imposes a challenge since no rules or guidelines exist. Possibilities and boundaries must be identified.


METHODS
The EACTS database committee established ECSUR (The European Cardiac SUrgical Registry) with the aim of collecting patient-by-patient information from centres across Europe. It was decided to collect patient data in three areas; adult cardiac surgery, paediatric cardiac surgery and thoracic surgery. Currently, these three areas are in different stages of development, with multinational data collection now having already commenced in adult cardiac surgery.


RESULTS
After just over a year of data collection ECSUR has now received data from 98 centres in 30 countries, encompassing approximately 100,000 patients. Three national cardiac surgical registries currently send their data to ECSUR, and agreement has been reached with three other countries for prospective data sharing during 1999.


CONCLUSIONS
This paper describes how ECSUR was established, the on-going status of the project, and how the project has now developed a global perspective through a joint European and US initiative to undertake international dataset unification for surgeons worldwide, by the definition of core adult cardiac, paediatric cardiac and thoracic surgical datasets.
Wyse
R K
RK
Department of Cardiac Surgery, Hammersmith Hospital, London, UK. rkh.wyse@rpms.ac.uk
Taylor
K M
KM
D003625:Data Collection; D005060:Europe; D006801:Humans; D016730:Program Development; D012042:Registries; D013903:Thoracic Surgery