Background
The long‐term outcomes of patients undergoing interventions for congenital heart disease (
CHD
) remain largely unknown. We linked the Pediatric Cardiac Care Consortium (
PCCC
) with the National Death Index (
NDI
) and the United Network for Organ Sharing Dataset (
UNOS
) registries to study mortality and transplant occurring up to 32 years postintervention. The objective of the current analysis was to determine the sensitivity of this linkage in identifying patients who are known to have died or undergone heart transplant.
Methods and Results
We used direct identifiers from 59 324 subjects registered in the
PCCC
between 1982 and 2003 to test for completeness of case ascertainment of subjects with known vital and heart transplant status by linkage with the
NDI
and
UNOS
registries. Of the 4612 in‐hospital deaths, 3873 were identified by the
NDI
as “true” matches for a sensitivity of 84.0% (95%
CI,
82.9–85.0). There was no difference in sensitivity across 25 congenital cardiovascular conditions after adjustment for age, sex, race, presence of first name, death year, and residence at death. Of 455 known heart transplants in the
PCCC
, there were 408 matches in the
UNOS
registry, for a sensitivity of 89.7% (95%
CI
, 86.9–92.3). An additional 4851 deaths and 363 transplants that occurred outside the
PCCC
were identified through 2014.
Conclusions
The linkage of the
PCCC
with the
NDI
and
UNOS
national registries is feasible with a satisfactory sensitivity. This linkage provides a conservative estimate of the long‐term death and heart transplant events in this cohort.