Patient Outcomes at the Cardiac Center
The Cardiac Center at CHOP carefully tracks overall pediatric heart surgery outcomes. This helps us identify areas for improvement and answer families’ questions about pediatric heart surgery survival.
Open Heart/Cardiopulmonary Bypass Cases
2017 - 2023 total procedures: 3,761
There are many important outcomes, but the most important is survival. Our pediatric heart surgery survival rates are among the best in the nation.
Outcomes by Procedure
Our surgical team performs more than 850 pediatric heart surgeries each year, including open heart and closed heart procedures and heart transplants — with outcomes that are among the best in the nation.
Standards for reporting outcomes
Most pediatric hospitals use the same standards, set by independent organizations, to collect and report outcomes data. The data here is based on national standards from the National Quality Forum, The Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the Congenital Heart Surgeons' Society, and the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients.
Independent data, such as that presented here, is a valuable tool to evaluate different programs’ expertise in cardiac surgery. Becoming well informed is one of the most important ways you can ensure that your child receives the best care. If your child is our patient, please feel free to ask your care team any questions about pediatric heart surgery survival.
CHOP’s Long-term Follow-up Program for Cardiac Surgery Survival Outcomes
Over the last 30 years, The Cardiac Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has been in the forefront of dramatic improvements in overall survival of children who undergo surgery for congenital heart disease. Most patients with the types of heart defects that were routinely fatal in the 1980s now survive into adulthood. But our staff’s commitment does not end when a child is discharged from CHOP after heart surgery. One example of this is long-term follow-up, even after cardiology patients return home to their local care team. CHOP’s Cardiac Center has teamed up with another large center, C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to systematically follow long-term outcomes of over 2,000 former heart surgery patients from both hospitals. Standardizing this type of information gathering will allow healthcare providers to better understand long-term survival, health status and quality of life in these patients.
“The more we know about these long-term outcomes, the better prepared healthcare providers will be to help design programs to optimize those outcomes, and to work with families, patients, and care teams to implement those programs,” said cardiac surgeon J. William Gaynor, MD, an expert in neurodevelopment in pediatric cardiology patients, and a leader in CHOP’s long-term follow-up efforts with these patients.