Overview
The Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Consortium (PC⁴) aims to improve the quality of care to patients with critical pediatric and congenital cardiovascular disease in North America and abroad. Formed in 2009 with National Institutes of Health funding, PC⁴ is a unique collaborative of leaders in pediatric cardiac critical care, cardiac surgery, and cardiology representing a diverse group of centers caring for these vulnerable patients. The core pillars of collaborative quality improvement serve as the foundation for PC⁴: purposeful collection of specific clinical data on outcomes and practice; timely performance feedback to clinicians, and continuous improvement based on empirical analysis and collaborative learning.
Our Mission
Transparent Collaboration
PC⁴ is a multi-institutional collaboration committed to discovery through transparent sharing of data. PC⁴ will provide member institutions with high-quality outcome data to benchmark performance and to identify opportunities for local quality improvement initiatives.
Cross Boundary Partnerships
We will partner with professional organizations and other quality collaboratives across geographic and subspecialty boundaries to integrate with existing databases and harmonize our common efforts.
Evidence-based Advancement
We seek to advance pediatric cardiac intensive care medicine through high-impact science, collaborative learning, identification of evidence-based best practices, and public dissemination of this information.
News & Publications
Racial and Ethnic Variation in ECMO Utilization and Outcomes in Pediatric Cardiac ICU Patients
Read MoreEvents
Thank you to all of you for participating and making the PC⁴/PAC3 Spring Conference in Toronto a success!
A special thank you to the fantastic team at Toronto Sick Kids for their generous support in hosting the conference!
Our Commitment
The Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Consortium (PC⁴) will be an international leader in the effort to improve outcomes across the lifespan of critically ill patients with pediatric and congenital heart disease. The Data Coordinating and Analytic Center (DCC) for PC⁴ is housed within the Michigan Congenital Heart Outcomes Research and Discovery (M-CHORD) Program at The University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
The DCC is responsible for communicating with participating sites, coordinating the efforts of our partnering vendors providing data collection capabilities and data feedback to the sites, developing and implementing risk adjustment models for benchmarking, and analyzing comprehensive registry and research data collected within PC⁴. These data will be used to examine variation in outcomes and practice patterns, generate new knowledge linking processes of care to outcomes, and identify best practices and opportunities for quality and efficiency improvement.
The DCC will support participants in establishing quality improvement goals, conducting rigorous science, and in implementing evidenced-based practices. DCC personnel include a dedicated project coordinator, data manager, biostatistician, and quality improvement expert. Dr. Kurt Schumacher is the Director of the Data Coordinating Center for PC⁴ and oversees the DCC functions
Coordinating Center.
PC⁴ will provide participating hospitals with:
- 24/7 access to real-time, reliable, and actionable data to be used for local quality improvement
- Risk- and reliability-adjusted comparative analyses on quality metrics selected by the consortium
- Innovative and sophisticated informatics platforms that integrate with other registry projects in pediatric cardiac care
- An infrastructure to identify and disseminate evidenced-based practices that improve clinical and resource utilization outcomes
- High return on investment
