At Rady Children’s Hospital, we have been performing all aspects of pediatric heart surgery for more than 30 years. Our pediatric heart surgeons, as well as the team of perfusionists and pediatric heart anesthesiologists, have been specifically trained by the best programs in the world.
Cardiovascular Surgery
Over the years, our team has collectively accumulated as much or more experience as the highest volume centers in California and in the United States. Many of these operations require cardiopulmonary bypass.
From newborn and infant heart surgery, to transplant and ventricular assist device placement, to older teenager and adults with congenital heart disease, you will find experts at Rady Children’s who are specifically trained to achieve the best surgical results.
We are a high-volume program and performed more than 1,100 total cardiovascular surgeries from July 1, 2017 – June 30, 2021.
For information on the conditions treated, click here.
Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit
Based on the most recent data from the Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Consortium, our program has the lowest risk-adjusted surgical mortality and lowest risk-adjusted postoperative duration of mechanical ventilation in the country.
Cardiac Catheterization
Cardiac catheterization plays a major role in the success of our Congenital Cardiovascular Disease Program. Many cases of congenital heart disease are treated solely by intervention in the catheterization laboratory without need for surgery. Interventional catheterization is also employed to improve surgical results and to rescue patients who are struggling after complex surgeries. Furthermore, diagnostic catheterization is essential to provide precise diagnosis in cases when other imaging modalities are not definitive.
The cardiac catheterization laboratory provides care for infants, children and adults with congenital and acquired heart diseases. We perform more than 600 procedures annually, and our laboratory is classified by the National Cardiovascular Data Registry as a high-volume congenital heart disease center. Three quarters of our procedures are interventional.
Electrophysiology
The Electrophysiology program at Rady Children’s has developed into one of the top-performing programs in the United States for catheter ablation outcomes, as well as for clinical and translational research efforts.
The EP team is lead by Dr. James Perry, who performed one of the first pediatric catheter ablations in Houston in late 1989. The program has an experienced group of nurses, cath lab technologists, anesthesiologists and surgeons to insure that EP care is both exceptional on a day-to-day basis and also at the cutting edge of innovation. The group recently implanted a long-term arrhythmia monitoring device in the youngest patient in the U.S. at the time to receive one. Clinically, we have a large volume of patients with “channelopathies,” including long QT Syndrome. Dr. Perry is on the medical advisory board of the SADS (sudden arrhythmia death syndrome) Foundation and recently stepped down from a long tenure on the board of the Adult Congenital Heart Association.
The EP program expanded in 2015 with the addition of Dr. Matthew Williams, who trained with us and completed an EP fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital. Our outcomes are outstanding, exceeding national published data, and are provided in an environment of personalized care and expertise. The program participates in a number of national multicenter studies, publishes novel approaches for EP care and has provided co-authorship for the guidelines of care for adult congenital heart patients with rhythm issues, asymptomatic Wolff-Parkinson-White patients and also the published standards for electrophysiology labs nationally.
The EP lab strives to provide the best care for EP assessments, catheter ablations, three-dimensional mapping and pacemaker, implantable loop recorder and ICD (defibrillator) implantations. The EP Program is also intimately involved in the care of our Hawaiian patients, in close collaboration with our colleagues at Kapi’olani Women and Children’s Hospital, Straub Clinic, Tripler Medical Center, Queen’s Hospital and Kaiser in Honolulu. We provide EP care in Honolulu four to five weeks each year, as part of a relationship dating back 23 years.
Outcomes for EP procedures performed there have matched our successes in San Diego. The EP program is also involved in National Institutes of Health R01-level funded research with the UC San Diego Department of Bioengineering, exploring unique means of assessing the relationships between heart structure, function and arrhythmias.
National Quality-Improvement Research Networks
The Heart Institute also participates in the following externally audited, national quality-improvement research networks:
- Society for Thoracic Surgery (STS) – Congenital Heart Surgery Database
- Society of Thoracic Surgeons CHD and the Congenital Cardiac Anesthesia Society (CCAS) Database
- Congenital Heart Surgeons Society’s (CHSS) ongoing multi-institutional study of outcomes and practices – Anomalous Aortic Origin of the Coronary Artery (AAOCA), Tricuspid Atresia (TA), Left Ventricular Outflow Tract Obstruction (LVOTO), and Pulmonary Conduits (PC)
- Improving Pediatric and Adult Congenital Treatment (IMPACT) Registry
- Congenital Cardiac Catheterization Project on Outcomes (C3PO) Registry
- Pediatric Heart Transplant Society (PHTS) Registry
- Interagency Registry for Mechanically Assisted Circulatory Support (Pedimacs/Intermacs) Advanced Cardiac Therapies Improving Outcomes Network (ACTION)
- Pediatric Critical Care Consortium (PC4)
- Pediatric Acute Care Cardiology Collaborative (PAC3)
- National Pediatric Cardiology – Quality Improvement Collaborative (NPC-QIC)
- Cardiac Neurodevelopmental Outcome Collaborative (CNOC)
- Extracorporeal Life Support Organization Registry (ELSO)