Adult Congenital Heart Program Treatments

Many of our patients come to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford as young children or infants—in some cases even earlier, as fetuses—and receive care from various specialty programs in our Betty Irene Moore Children’s Heart Center. Others find our ACHD program at Packard Children’s Hospital when they are teenagers or young adults, or through Stanford Health Care when they are adults. We welcome people of all ages and stages of congenital heart disease in our joint ACHD program.

By understanding the start of congenital heart disease in childhood, our Adult Congenital Heart Program experts are better positioned to care for both children and adults. Our superior congenital disease heart care of today’s generation of children gives us great insight into their congenital heart disease (CHD) as tomorrow’s adults. For example, cardiac interventions in childhood can affect the progression of their disease decades later. Also, early expert treatment can eliminate the need for certain procedures later on and result in a greater quality of life.

Treatments for simple to complex conditions offered from our joint ACHD program provide:

• Heart surgery from nationally renowned cardiothoracic surgeons. Children with congenital heart disease often need highly complex heart surgeries for congenital heart defects such as single ventricle , congenitally corrected transposition of the great arteries, tetralogy of Fallot (treated by a novel approach pioneered at Packard Children’s Hospital called unifocalization), and more. Our Betty Irene Moore Children’s Heart Center’s pediatric surgeons perform more than 700 heart surgeries with exceptional outcomes each year, despite the complexity of cardiac cases they see. Our ACHD program works closely with heart surgeons at both our children’s and adult hospitals to care for people before and after surgery, and throughout their lifetime. Examples of highly complex heart surgeries we perform include Fontan, Glenn shunt, and Blalock-Taussig shunt. Learn more about our ACHD program outcomes.
• Full spectrum of clinical treatments. Our specialized heart experts are available 24/7. We provide advanced, highly complex care for all of your child’s needs. Besides performing the entire spectrum of heart surgeries, we perform interventional cardiology, ablations, transcatheter implantation, ventricular assist devices implantation, heart and multi-organ transplants (heart/lung, heart/kidney, heart/liver), and high-risk obstetrics to empower the female patients in our Adult Congenital Heart Program to have children safely and successfully.