National Congenital Heart Disease Audit

The Congenital Heart Disease audit collects data on all cardiac surgery and therapeutic cardiac catheterisations procedures used to treat patients with congenital and acquired heart disease Data collection: Hospitals use Patient Administration Systems and manual data entry by cardiac database managers to submit data to NICOR. Data are either assimilated locally using third party commercial software and imported as a .csv file, or entered directly onto the NICOR database. Data quality: NICOR provide tools that communicate possible errors to centres submitting data. A data submitting schedule has been agreed with the centres, data is submitted and a validation report is returned each quarter. Centres are responsible for updating errors in the records. An import log highlights missing and invalid data as well as records that failed to import due to data quality or compatibility issues. In addition, data is validated by on site visits with a NICOR representative. Data linkage: Data is annually linked with Office fot National Statistics (ONS) life status and Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES) admission data to verify case ascertainment and to track long term outcome measures. Information governance: NICOR has Section 251 approval and data protection registration. An organisation-wide standard operating procedure is in place for Information Security Incident Management. University College London has a robust information governance framework, to which NICOR adheres.