Trends in mortality rate in patients with congenital heart disease undergoing noncardiac surgical procedures at children’s hospitals

Advances made in pediatric cardiology, cardiac surgery and critical care have significantly improved the survival rate of patients with congenital heart disease (CHD) leading to an increase in children with CHD presenting for noncardiac surgical procedures. This study aims (1) to describe the trend and perioperative mortality rates in patients with CHD undergoing noncardiac surgical procedures at children’s hospitals over the past 5 years and (2) to describe the patient characteristics and the most common type of surgical procedures. The Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS) is an administrative database that contains inpatient, observation, and outpatient surgical data from 52 freestanding children’s hospitals. Thirty-nine of the 52 hospitals submitted data on all types of patient encounters for the duration of the study from 2015 to 2019. The total numbers of non-cardiac surgical encounters among patients with history of a CHD diagnosis significantly increased each year from 38,272 in 2015 to 45,993 in 2019 (P