Critical Pediatric Heart Deaths Drop by 24% at Hospitals With Cardiac ICUs

ihpi.umich.edu November 26, 2019

Major complications fall by 12%, time on a ventilator declines by 13% among children in the cardiac ICU at PC4 hospitals

As a pediatric cardiology fellow nearly a decade ago, Michael Gaies remembers asking hospital colleagues a simple question: How good are we at providing cardiac intensive care for children?

“There wasn’t a good answer because there wasn’t a good way to measure our performance. We didn’t have access to the right data,” recalls Gaies, M.D., director of quality at the Congenital Heart Center at Michigan Medicine’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.

Postoperative mortality dropped by 24% among participating sites between 2014 and 2018, according to the Michigan Medicine-led research in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Major complications also fell by 12%, time on a ventilator declined by 13% and length of stay in the ICU was down by 5%.