Pioneering Advanced Treatment
Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh is recognized throughout the world as a leader in the advanced treatment of pediatric heart disease, providing care for patients from the fetus through adulthood.
The reasons are simple. We embrace innovation and cutting-edge technology as a way of providing our patients with state-of-the-art care and a higher quality of life. We work diligently to broaden our understanding of heart disease, develop better therapies and quickly move advances from the laboratory to the patient’s bedside, where they matter the most.
Advances made by Children’s physicians include the following:
- The Heart Center’s Pediatric Heart and Lung Transplantation Program is one of the most experienced and innovative in the world.
- Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh was the first center to establish a comprehensive solid organ transplant program, now 25 years old.
- The fruits of our heart and lung research include advanced technologies routinely used today, such as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), which is used to support patients with severe life-threatening respiratory and cardiac problems.
- Our surgeons are advancing the use of mechanical heart pumps such as the ventricular assist device (VAD) as bridges to pediatric transplantation or recovery.
- We opened the region’s first pediatric cardiac intensive care unit in 2003.
- For more than twenty years, our Fetal Cardiology Program has worked with Magee-Womens Hospital of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to evaluate heart function as early as sixteen weeks’ gestation and determine how to manage any heart condition detected.
- Heart Center cardiologists use standard and advanced diagnostic tools to evaluate problems such as congenital abnormalities, enlarged hearts and irregular heartbeats or arrhythmias.
- Our Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory is advancing the use of catheters for diagnosing problems and the latest invasive technology to treat and even cure congenital heart defects and arrhythmias.
- Our researchers are investigating the technologies of tomorrow, including the possibility of correcting abnormalities, by harnessing the power individual cells and engineering a pump to assist weakened hearts of infants until surgery or until they grow strong on their own.
- Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh is the first pediatric hospital to fully implement a computerized physician order entry system, making what already was a safe hospital even safer by guarding against medication errors and giving our physicians and nurses easier access to critical patient information.
Updated 7/25/07
