Choosing the Right Heart Center for Your Child

Receiving a congenital heart disease (CHD) diagnosis for your child comes with a lot of questions. And when your child needs heart care, you want to know they’re in the best hands. This guide will help you know what questions to ask to find the best care for your child.

Cardiac surgery outcomes and survival rates

One of the best ways to learn about a heart program is to look at its cardiac surgery outcomes. Outcomes data can help families understand how a program performs across different types of heart surgery, as well as how many procedures the program performs each year.

Questions to ask while searching for your child’s cardiologist

Does every hospital report and share their outcomes?

Not every heart program makes its outcomes publicly available. Ask whether a program participates in national clinical registries, such as the STS Congenital Heart Surgery Database or IMPACT Registry, and whether families can review its results. We publicly share our cardiac outcomes and encourage families to use this information when comparing heart centers.

Does the team specialize in congenital and pediatric heart disease?

Children with heart conditions have different needs than adults, and congenital heart disease can require highly specialized expertise. When choosing a heart center, ask about the training and experience of the surgeons, cardiologists, anesthesiologists, intensivists and other specialists who will care for your child. At the Heart Institute, our teams specialize in caring for infants, children and adolescents with congenital and acquired heart conditions.

How many heart surgeries and procedures does your program perform every year?

A program’s surgical and procedural volume can help you understand the depth of experience its team has caring for children with heart conditions. It can be especially helpful to ask how frequently a center treats children with your child’s specific diagnosis or performs the procedure your child may need.

What specialists are part of your child's heart team?

Children with complex heart conditions often need expertise from many different specialties. A comprehensive heart program brings those specialists together so they can coordinate care before, during and after a procedure, and address your child’s needs beyond their heart condition.

Our multidisciplinary team of pediatric heart experts includes:

What types of pediatric heart surgery do you perform and what are your outcomes for each surgery?

Families should ask about a center’s experience and outcomes for the specific procedure their child may need. Overall surgical outcomes are important, but procedure-specific results can provide additional context, especially for complex or less common operations. Our publicly reported outcomes allow families to review results for specific congenital heart procedures and compare them with national benchmarks.

Cardiac surgery survival rates by procedure type

What are your outcomes for the most complex congenital heart surgeries? 

Congenital heart surgeries vary significantly in complexity. The Society of Thoracic Surgeons groups procedures into five STAT categories based on their expected risk of mortality, with STAT 1 representing lower-risk procedures and STAT 5 representing the most complex, higher-risk procedures. Looking at outcomes across these categories can help families understand how a center performs when caring for children who require particularly complex surgery.

Source: Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) data from January 1, 2022 through December 31, 2025. STS compiles the largest congenital heart surgery database. Data taken from the spring 2026 risk-adjusted report.

What other outcomes should I consider besides survival rates?

Survival is an important measure of surgical quality, but it is not the only one. Families may also want to ask how a program measures complications, infections, length of stay, unplanned reoperations, readmissions and other outcomes following surgery.

How does your program care for the whole child?

Heart conditions often affect more than just the heart. Ask what their program does to support your whole child’s health. For example, our Heart Institute does extensive work to promote a child’s neurodevelopment while in the hospital and after they’ve returned home. Congenital heart disease can affect development, feeding, growth, learning and emotional health in addition to the heart itself. Ask how a heart center identifies these needs early and supports children as they grow.

How do you include family members in the decision-making process?

We encourage family involvement in every phase of each child’s care. For children who require a heart surgery or heart catheter, we meet with the family to discuss the procedure in advance and encourage families to ask questions, tour our facility and meet our team. If your child stays in the hospital, we invite families to participate in daily check-ins with the inpatient care teams when possible.

Our goal is to make sure families, pediatricians and cardiologists all have the information they need to understand a child’s needs for treatment and follow-up care.

What should I know about a congenital heart disease diagnosis before birth?

Once a prenatal diagnosis is confirmed, it takes a lot of coordination to make sure you have a successful delivery and your maternal fetal and cardiology teams are prepared for care as soon as your baby is born. Ask how the team prepares and coordinates between their different specialties, including maternal fetal medicine, fetal cardiology, obstetrics, neonatology, delivery planning and pediatric cardiology.

How will you coordinate with my child's other doctors? 

Your child’s care will involve more than just heart specialists, so it’s important they can explain how they’ll coordinate with your child’s doctor.

We work closely with pediatricians, family medicine doctors and pediatric cardiologists both here in Colorado and in surrounding states. Our team provides your child’s doctors with regular updates when your child is staying here at the hospital or when we see them in our cardiology clinic.

If your baby’s heart requires a procedure when they are born, we care for them in our Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU). Our cardiac operating rooms, catheterization labs and cardiology clinic are all located on the same floor. Once your baby no longer needs intensive care, they will graduate to the Cardiac Progressive Care Unit (CPCU), our step-down unit staffed by specialty-trained cardiac nurses and cardiology physicians. Babies born prematurely or who have other health issues may receive care in our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) with close monitoring by the cardiology team.

How do you help prepare families to go home after surgery?

Babies with heart conditions often need ongoing care even after they’re ready to leave the hospital. The best children’s heart centers prepare families for that transition.

Our primary goal when your child goes home is to ensure that families understand their child’s individual medical and developmental needs. We connect families to resources both through our hospital and in their communities to help them successfully transition home.

Starting when your child is admitted, we help you get involved in your child’s care so you can start understanding your child’s needs. Our specialized nursing staff educates you so that you’re comfortable with care procedures when you leave the hospital and know when to contact your child’s primary care doctor or cardiologist.

Our dietitians help you understand what nutrition your child needs to grow and thrive, as this may change when they are recovering from surgery. Our cardiac pharmacists, nurses and doctors make sure you understand your child’s medication and educate you about the medicines your child needs, including dosage, timing and how to give the medicine. And our therapy team, including physical therapists, speech therapists, occupational therapists and lactation consultants, help determine the therapy goals your child may benefit from once they leave the hospital.

What support can you provide me and my family?

Ask about the services they can provide to support you and your family throughout your medical journey:

Connecting families: We frequently connect families with other parents living with their child’s heart condition and schedule weekly time for new families to meet and chat with current families. Depending on your family’s needs, we may be able to refer or connect you with other hospital and community resources.

Financial services: Our social work team also helps provide information about financial support.

Nutrition services: Registered dietitians with expertise in cardiac nutrition support your child when they’re in the hospital and after they leave. They can answer questions related to general nutrition, growth, tube feeding and IV nutrition.

Mental health support: We have a range of experts from social work, child life, psychology, spiritual care and medicine to provide mental health support. Social workers help families cope with social, financial and psychological needs associated with their child’s illness and care. Child life specialists use therapeutic play, education and coping techniques to help children, families and siblings cope with the hospital, chronic illness and treatments. Psychologists provide assessments and treatments to address developmental, behavioral, emotional, social and academic concerns. Chaplains offer support to children and families of all faith traditions and spiritual expressions.

As a team, we offer support to your child and family throughout treatment into childhood and adolescence. We also offer prenatal counseling and ongoing mental health support to families whose babies were diagnosed with a heart defect before they were born. Additionally, our cardiac neurodevelopmental experts provide specialized testing for children and young adults with heart disease.

What long-term care might my child need? 

Long-term care can look very different for children depending on many factors. Advances in congenital heart care mean that more children with heart disease are living well into adulthood. Their long-term needs vary depending on their diagnosis, anatomy, previous procedures and other health factors. Some children need additional procedures or lifelong cardiology follow-up, while others may need support with development, learning, exercise, nutrition or emotional health.

Make sure you ask what kind of support each program can provide as your child grows and develops. Even adults born with a heart condition need specialty care that traditional doctors may not be able to provide. Our Adult Congenital Heart Disease Program was developed to support our patients after they have grown up but still need to take their congenital heart condition into account when considering care options. The best heart center will provide care for your child and family today and well into the future.