Best Hospitals for Children With Severe Congenital Heart Disease

Total anomalous pulmonary venous return. Hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Truncus arteriosus. Terms like these speak volumes to the parents of children with severe congenital heart defects.

Heart defects occur in about 1 in 100 babies, or about 40,000 U.S. newborns per year. While any such problem can be terrifying, the surgeries required for the most severe defects are particularly risky, and the road to a healthy childhood is especially long.

Some hospitals have more experience than others in treating the most severe forms of congenital heart disease, and those are where many parents turn if their child needs a high-risk operation. Studies show the more experience a hospital and its surgical team have in performing high-risk operations, the better outcomes tend to be.

To help this subset of CHD parents identify a hospital that may be best for their child, U.S. News compiled a list of 30 hospitals that meet the following two criteria.

Each medical center listed:

— Earned a top-50 ranking in the 2022-2023 Best Hospitals for Pediatric Cardiology & Heart Surgery rankings.

— And scored high or very high for the number of high-risk pediatric heart surgeries it has handled, which means it performed at least 300 such operations in the last four years for which U.S. News has data.

Each hospital’s corresponding ranking among the top 50 Best Hospitals for Pediatric Cardiology & Heart Surgery is also shown in the left-hand column below to provide parents with context.

30 Best Hospitals for Children With Severe Congenital Heart Disease

National Rank	Hospital	State	Complex Case Volume
1	Texas Children’s Hospital	Texas	816
2	Boston Children’s Hospital	Massachusetts	1,000
3	UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh	Pennsylvania	330
4	MUSC Children’s Heart Network of South Carolina	South Carolina	309
5	New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell	New York	641
6	Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital	Ohio	308
6	Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health	Indiana	377
7	Duke Children’s Hospital and Health Center	North Carolina	343
8	Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia	Pennsylvania	641
9	Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago	Illinois	335
10	University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital	Michigan	620
12	Children’s Hospital Los Angeles	California	812
14	Children’s Hospital Colorado	Colorado	431
15	Nationwide Children’s Hospital	Ohio	352
16	Cincinnati Children’s and Kentucky Children’s Hospital Joint Heart Program	Ohio	490
18	Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta	Georgia	681
19	Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital	Tennessee	311
19	Children’s Mercy Kansas City	Missouri	316
23	Seattle Children’s Hospital	Washington	487
24	St. Louis Children’s Hospital-Washington University	Missouri	312
26	Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford	California	850
28	Children’s Hospital of Alabama at UAB	Alabama	311
28	Children’s Medical Center Dallas	Texas	428
30	Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt	Tennessee	464
35	Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital	Texas	307
37	Phoenix Children’s Hospital	Arizona	361
38	Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital-University of Utah	Utah	461
40	Mayo Clinic Children’s Minnesota Cardiovascular Collaborative	Minnesota	772
41	UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, San Francisco and Oakland	California	507
48	Cook Children’s Medical Center	Texas	376

Ben Harder oversees methodology and data analysis for U.S. News & World Report’s portfolio of data-driven patient decision-support tools, including the Best Hospitals and Best Children’s Hospitals rankings, Best Nursing Homes ratings, and searchable Find a Doctor directory. A frequent speaker on topics related to quality measurement and public reporting, Harder is a healthcare journalist whose work has appeared in BMJ, JAMA, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic News, Science News, USA Today, the Washington Post and other publications. A Science News cover story he wrote about the use of maggots in medicine was anthologized in Best American Science Writing 2005. He is a graduate of Harvard University, where he served as the first Editor in Chief of Let’s Go Publications, a publisher of travel guides. He completed a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation journalism fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2002 and has been an editor at U.S. News since 2007. He tweets @benharder.

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Best Hospitals for Children With Severe Congenital Heart Disease originally appeared on usnews.com

Update 06/14/22: This story was previously published at an earlier date and has been updated with new ranking results.