Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital offers specialized services for children born with heart conditions. Together with affiliated physicians, it aims to provide each child with congenital heart disease the opportunity to live a healthy life.

The affiliated team of pediatric heart surgeons, pediatric cardiologists, and other specialists offers patients specialized and innovative treatment options to provide hope to children with even the most challenging of congenital heart diseases.

The care provided at Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital is one of the only places in the world where procedures are performed to restore or rearrange cardiac connections.

The normal heart has four chambers: two upper chambers called atria, which receive blood into the heart, and two lower chambers called ventricles, which pump blood out of the heart.

Many children with a congenital heart defect have only one functional ventricle, or pumping chamber, that is able to pump blood effectively.

Biventricular repair, biventricular conversion, and ventricular recruitment are treatment options for complex congenital heart patients born with a single ventricle defect, or a small right or left heart.

Traditionally, the treatment for these types of heart conditions involves a series of open heart surgeries (the Norwood, Glenn, and Fontan procedures) to allow the single working ventricle to pump blood to the body, leaving the blue blood to flow passively to the lungs.

This traditional treatment option, while effective in many patients, can ultimately lead to heart failure, decreased quality of life, and potential need for heart transplantation.

The affiliated team always searches for the best possible pathway for a child’s unique heart.

Memorial Hermann's experience shows that biventricular procedures can result in fewer operations throughout a child’s lifetime and have the potential to improve the long-term quality of life, and even remove the need for a heart transplant.

At Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital, patients receive hands-on, specialized care 24/7 from a team of affiliated physicians and specialty trained nurses.

With a Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, a dedicated pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, a pediatric heart failure and transplant program, and an accredited adult congenital heart program, patients with congenital heart conditions are cared for in an advanced and highly specialized setting developed just for them.

We are ready and willing to provide the best possible care to any patient who needs us throughout their lifetime.

Meet biventricular heroes Kingston and Rasheed, and learn more here.