Heart Center

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.