Cardiac Care
Fact sheet

• In 2006, a survey by Child magazine ranked the Cardiac Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia number two in the nation.
• The Cardiac Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is a multidisciplinary program providing the most advanced care for neonates, infants, children and adults with all types of congenital and acquired heart and lung disease. 
• The Cardiac Center is staffed by a team of internationally recognized pediatric cardiologists, cardiothoracic surgeons, cardiac anesthesiologists, critical care specialists and cardiac nurses who work together to provide integrated, state-of-the-art care for children with cardiac conditions and their families. Consultations are available from pre-eminent sub-specialists in pediatrics and neonatology.
• The Cardiac Center's multidisciplinary approach has enabled the Cardiac Center to achieve a consistently outstanding record of outcomes that are among the best in the world.
• The Cardiac Center houses an internationally renowned program in cardiothoracic surgery and is one of the largest centers in the world caring for children with heart disease.
• The Cardiac Center is one of only a few programs in the nation with a specialized team of pediatric cardiac anesthesiologists, providing anesthesia and pain management for patients with congenital heart disease.
• In May 2004, the Cardiac Center opened a new 26-bed Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU). Along with state-of-the-art monitoring and treatment facilities, the unit provides comfortable accommodations for parents, further fulfilling the promise of family centered care for cardiac patients and their families. The 20-bed Cardiac Intermediate Care Unit, adjacent to the CICU, makes Children's Hospital's Cardiac Center one of the largest pediatric cardiac units in the country.
• The CICU at Children’s Hospital is one of the most active in the nation, providing comprehensive intensive care services for approximately 900 acutely ill cardiac patients annually, of whom more than one- half are newborns and infants.
• The Cardiac Center performs more than 1,000cardiac surgical procedures a year, including more than 600 pediatric open heart surgeries, provides cardiac evaluation and treatment in more than 18,000 outpatient visits, and performs more than 42,000 diagnostic studies annually.
• The Cardiac Center performs more than 1000 cardiac catheterizations annually, one of the highest volumes of cardiac catheterizations of any program in North America.  The Center’s extensive experience in catheterization techniques includes the ability to repair selected heart defects without surgery and to permanently treat abnormal heart rhythms with radiofrequency ablation.
• Advocacy for children with cardiac disease is a key component of the Cardiac Center. In 2003, Center staff helped to raise money to fund the placement of automated external defibrillators in every public high school in the Philadelphia School District to help prevent sudden cardiac death.
• The Fetal Heart Program, a subspecialty within the Cardiac Center, provides earlier diagnoses that lead to earlier treatment interventions and improved overall outcomes. It specializes in the detection, evaluation and ongoing management of congenital heart disease.  Nearly 1,600 fetal echocardiographic studies are performed annually, making it among the largest programs of its kind in the nation.
• Ongoing industry and federally funded research at the Cardiac Center is investigating the underlying causes of congenital heart disease, the most common birth defect and leading cause of childhood death under the age of one year.  Multidisciplinary researchers in the Cardiac Center, and Divisions of Neurology, Genetics, Developmental Pediatrics and Biostatistics have formed the Neuro-Cardiac Research Program (NCRP). The goals of the NCRP are to understand the mechanisms of brain injury in pediatric patients with heart disease, to prevent neurological injury with innovative drugs and surgical techniques, and to improve the long-term neurological outcomes, school performance and quality-of-life of survivors of congenital heart disease.
• Children's Hospital is one of four centers nationwide that the National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute (NHLBI) has designated a Specialized Center of Clinically Oriented Research (SCCOR) in Pediatric Heart Development and Disease. The Institute's SCCOR program is an initiative designed to speed the process by which advances in basic scientific knowledge are translated into innovative treatments for patients. Drawing on talents of multidisciplinary teams is an important feature of the SCCOR program; at Children's Hospital the team includes cardiologists, cardiac surgeons and geneticists.
• The Cardiology Division is one of seven centers participating in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Pediatric Heart Disease Clinical Research Network, a national multicenter network designed to speed research findings to clinical care in children with heart disease.

For more information
Cancer Care
Emergency Medicine
Newborn/Infant Care
Orthopaedics
Pulmonology