Heart Center

What sets our Heart Center apart?

• We have been named #1 in Cardiology and Heart Surgery every year that U.S.News & World Report has ranked the nation's top pediatric hospitals by specialty.
   
• Whenever we can, we choose minimally invasive approaches to treat heart disease. We believe strongly in:
  • Choosing catheterization over open-heart surgery
  • Repairing heart valves rather than replacing them
  • Using medical management in place of heart-lung bypass machines and other ventricular-assist devices
     
• The care we provide doesn’t begin when patients are admitted to the hospital, or end when they go home—and it isn’t restricted by a patient's age.
  
  We serve as a resource for all patients with congenital heart defects.
   

A world-class team, working tirelessly for every patient

The Boston Children’s Heart Center team is made up of more than 500 individual experts. This size allows us to offer customized care, in more specialties, for every patient.

• Our team members have extensive training not only in pediatric cardiology, but in treating all congenital heart disease.
   
• Our experts have developed one of the nation's premier programs for adults with congenital heart conditions.
   
• Our doctors and nurses are also pioneers in life-saving fetal cardiac interventions.

Learn more about our care team.

Our outcomes

Despite treating the most serious congenital heart conditions, the Boston Children's Hospital Heart Center has some of the best success rates in the world, with surgical survival rates that approach 99 percent.

• Our Heart Center facts and figures
• Our surgical outcomes
• Our catheterization outcomes

Quality and safety

Our commitment to delivering exceptional care extends to quality and safety initiatives, too. 

• Our transplant cases are actually decreasing—because we have come up with new ways to treat conditions that previously required transplantation.

• In some cases, our surgical caseloads are also decreasing, due to our widespread use of catheterization.

• Our patient-to-nurse ratio has decreased because of our nursing staff’s elite level of experience.

Learn more about our quality initiatives.

What's new

Making history

In 2007, Boston Children’s Hospital cardiac surgeon Francis Fynn-Thompson, MD, received special permission from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to implant a Berlin Heart^®—a ventricular assist devices (VAD) that temporarily takes over the heart’s pumping functions—in a 9-year-old boy on the waiting list for a donor heart. This life-saving procedure laid the groundwork for the development of a national multi-institutional trial studying the efficacy and safety of the Berlin Heart in children. In 2011, the Berlin Heart device received FDA approval to support children of all ages to transplantation. This could not have been possible without the integral role that Boston Children’s Hospital cardiologist Christopher Almond, MD, MPH, played in helping design and conduct this trial.  [ref NEJM paper]

In 2012, Boston Children’s hospital once again petitioned the FDA for special approval to use a new, totally implantable device called the HeartWare^® in a 13-year-old girl. She was the first patient with a VAD at Boston Children’s to be discharged home and the first child with the HeartWare in the United States to resume school.  Learn more.

Our Heart Center team is proud to have been ranked #1 in the nation in Cardiology & Heart Surgery by U.S. News & World Report.

• Learn more about U.S. News & World Report's rankings for the nation's best pediatric hospitals.
• Hear stories from heart patients at Boston Children's.