Heart Program
Each year, there several hundred children are born in Oregon and the surrounding region with heart defects. Without specialists who are dedicated to diagnosing these defects, offering innovative non-surgical therapies, providing safe surgical reconstruction and caring for these children during their convalescence, many families in the Pacific Northwest would be denied the joy of raising healthy and happy children.
The Children’s Heart Program at Doernbecher is the only heart program with surgeons who are dedicated to repairing children’s congenital heart defects. Doernbecher also has specialists in pediatric cardiac interventional catheterization (who can cure a variety of heart defects in the catheter lab without the need for open surgery), pediatric electrophysiology (to diagnose and treat complex rhythm disturbances) and pediatric echocardiography (ultrasound of the heart).
Since 2001, the Doernbecher heart team has performed close to 2,000 open-heart operations with outcomes that are among the nation’s best. They have also cured hundreds of heart defects in the catheter lab — defects that other centers in Oregon and Southwest Washington repair surgically because they don’t have the capability to offer non-surgical care. Quite simply, there is nothing like the Doernbecher’s Pediatric Cardiac Program in the region — and only a few places like it in the world.
