Care Center

Heart Center

Patient safety and quality

The Boston Children's Heart Center is committed to providing the highest quality care to our patients. Through individual department initiatives and institution-wide standards, we are working to improve the patient/family experience and ensure the best possible outcomes.

The following list of department quality and safety initiatives is by no means all-inclusive. Please check back frequently for the latest information.  

  • 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.
     
  • We aim to have patients spend less time on ventilators—and in the hospital—and have reduced our average length of stay.
     
  • We also choose a transfusion-free approach whenever possible.
     
  • We devised the national standards for assessing quality and risk in the field, including the Risk Adjustment for Congenital Heart Surgery (RACHS) measurements that other centers are now evaluated against.
     
  • To address rising health care costs, we developed a plan to optimize care and reduce unnecessary resource utilization

Learn more about quality and safety initiatives at Boston Children’s Hospital.