History
Three registries, one operation, three different answers.
The collaborative grew out of a working group convened at an international vascular meeting, where three separate registries were found to be recording incompatible outcome measures for the same operation. Each was internally consistent. None could be compared with the others.
That finding was the argument for the collaborative: not that centers were treating patients badly, but that the profession had no way of telling whether one approach was better than another, because the question could not be asked in a single language.
The working group became a standing collaborative in 2026, with a founding committee drawn from vascular surgery, thoracic surgery, neurology and rehabilitation, and an explicit commitment to publish its definitions before collecting a single record.
TOSIC will supply the founding narrative, dates and names. Until then this text stands in for it.