Cardiology Outpatient Services

Your visit

Mother with infant At Children’s, we consider you and your child integral parts of the care team and not simply recipients of care. We specialize in family-centered care, which means that from your first visit, you’ll work with a team of professionals who are committed to supporting all of your family’s physical and psychosocial needs.

For your convenience, we have 11 clinics staffed by cardiologists from the Cardiology Outpatient Service at Boston Children's Hospital who rotate to these clinics on a regular basis. In most cases the team includes a nurse, nurse practitioner, echocardiographer and occasionally a pediatric cardiology fellow.

What to expect

At the Cardiology Outpatient Clinic, patients typically undergo history and physical examinations as well as an electrocardiogram (EKG). Depending on what the cardiologist learns from these exams, additional testing may be done, including 2 or 3-dimensional echocardiography, exercise stress testing, Holter or event monitoring.

How long will I be there?

Please expect to spend a minimum of about two hours at the cardiology outpatient clinic if you are scheduled for a clinic visit and echocardiogram.

Often, any necessary additional testing can be completed on the same day, although scheduling conflicts sometimes require a return visit.

Who performs the exams?

We have more than 50 cardiologists on staff as well as more than 43 fellows in training. Each of our patients is assigned a cardiologist that is responsible for coordinating all of their care throughout their lifetime. Often, cardiology fellows will assess a patient first and then discuss their findings with the patients cardiologist. Both cardiologists return to examine the patient and explain their findings.

In some instances, a nurse practitioner will perform the first evaluation and give the information to the staff cardiologist. Together, this team will evaluate the patient, discuss the findings and make recommendations about further testing and follow-up visits. Our entire team helps make the visit easier and more efficient for patients and their families.

In either case, the team approach provides patients and their families the opportunity to contact more than one member of our team for questions later.