Children's Hospital Colorado
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Caring pediatric nurses are available 24/7 to help answer your questions.

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Children’s Hospital Colorado
Anschutz Medical Campus
13123 East 16th Avenue
Aurora, CO 80045

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Emergency and urgent care locations

In life-threatening emergencies, find the emergency room location nearest you. For non-life-threatening medical needs when your pediatrician is unavailable, visit one of our urgent care locations.

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See a listing of all our Children’s Hospital Colorado locations including inpatient, outpatient, therapy, surgery facilities and more.

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Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU)

Pediatric Intensive Care Quality and Patient Safety Outcomes

No one expects that their child will end up in the ICU. Our team is equipped to help patients and families traverse that journey, with the expertise, compassion and empathy that they need to heal.

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In many ways, pediatric intensive care is the heart of our hospitals — hubs that serve and drive outcomes for every specialty. Whether it’s patients with acute disease and trauma, patients coming out of surgeries and organ transplants, or patients with complicated conditions — our pediatric intensive care units (PICU) care for them all.

Our PICUs on the Anschutz Medical Campus and in Colorado Springs care for some of the most acute, high-risk pediatric conditions in seven states. And our teams at both locations handle higher volumes while providing better outcomes and shorter stays than the national average — by a wide margin.

At Children's Colorado, we evaluate our success by comparing our PICU outcomes with other top pediatric hospitals. Transparency with our patients and colleagues is one of the keys to our success as one of the top children's hospitals in the U.S.

We measure various outcomes to ensure that we're providing the highest level of pediatric critical care for our patients.

PICU volumes

Children's Colorado is home to one of the busiest PICUs in the country. In fact, our PICU on the Anschutz Medical Campus treats more patients annually compared to the averages of our peer institutions. This means we have more

experience treating patients with a wide variety of illnesses and injuries.

30% More patients than the national average
3,900+ PICU patients treated last year
98% Overall patient survival rate


With clinical staffing to match our busy unit, each child receives the individual attention and constant monitoring they need.

PICU survival rates

Our dedication to providing exceptional care to kids and families allows us to achieve PICU survival rates among the best in the country. Our overall patient survival rate across both locations is 98%, outperforming the national average.

Mortality in our PICUs is much lower than the national average. The following graph shows the standardized mortality ratio (SMR), or the predicted mortality given how severe a patient's illness is, against the actual outcome. The lower the ratio, the better. We then compare that measure against the national average.

Standardized Mortality Ratio (PRISM III) for Anschutz Medical Campus and Colorado Springs combined

  • Lower is better

Standardized Mortality Ratio (PRISM III) for Anschutz Medical Campus

  • Lower is better

Even though our patients are more critically ill than those at other hospitals, we generally have a higher survival rate than expected. Our SMR is also better than the national average.

Length of stay in the PICU

Our goal is to safely get kids home or to their next step in care as quickly as possible.

The standardized or severity-adjusted length-of-stay ratio (SLOSR) predicts length of stay based on the severity of the child's condition. Here, too, we are better than the national average.

Standardized LOS Radio (PRISM III) for Anschutz Medical Campus and Colorado Springs combined

  • Lower is better

Standardized LOS Ratio (PRISM III) for Anschutz Medical Campus

  • Lower is better

Our patients are sicker than patients at other PICUs, but they leave our PICU sooner than expected.

Effective and efficient care in the PICU

The gold standard for pediatric intensive care is to help kids get the best outcome as quickly as possible. That’s why we track our mortality ratio in relation to our length of stay ratio.

We compare our mortality ratio (SMR) to our length of stay ratio (SLOSR) and then judge that against national averages.

95th Percentile in both standardized mortality ratio and length of stay ratio

We scored as well or better than 95% of similar institutions when comparing our standardized mortality ratio to our standardized length of stay ratio. Our patients have a higher survival rate than expected and a shorter length of stay than expected. We rank higher than almost all similar institutions when considering both of these measures.

“We owe our success to the hard work and dedication of our multidisciplinary PICU team. We have a team of skilled caregivers who are not only experts in clinical care but have also established national reputations in quality improvement, education, basic science and clinical research.”
Cameron Gunville, DO

Learn more about how we care for children with critical illness in our PICU.