The Society of Thoracic Surgeons General Thoracic Surgery Database: 2020 Update on Outcomes and Research.

The Society of Thoracic Surgeons General Thoracic Surgery Database (STS GTSD) remains the largest and most robust thoracic surgical database in the world. The GTSD provides participant sites risk-adjusted performance reports for benchmarking and facilitates quality improvement initiatives. In addition, the GTSD provides several mechanisms for high-quality research utilizing data from over 283 participant sites and nearly 620,000 procedures since its inception in 2002. Participant sites are audited at random annually in order to ensure continued completeness and accuracy of the GTSD. In 2020 the GTSD migrated to a cloud-based interactive data platform and the Task Force continues to refine the data collection form to decrease data entry burden while maintaining data quality, granularity, and relevance. This report provides an update on outcomes, volume trends, and database improvements as well as a summary of research productivity resulting from the GTSD over the preceding year.