Advocate Children's Hospital Receives Coveted Top Quality Award

Advocate Children’s Hospital has earned the highest rating – three stars – from the Chicago-based Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) for the quality of the hospital’s pediatric cardiovascular surgery program.

By receiving the highest rating, our cardiovascular surgery program ranks among the top five percent of programs in the United States and Canada. Only six out of 113 children’s hospitals who submitted data to the Society received three stars.

Stars are awarded on a score that the Society of Thoracic Surgeons calculates using a variety of quality measures, including risk-adjusted mortality rate and length of stay. Advocate Children’s Hospital’s overall risk-adjusted mortality rate is three percent, which is below the national average for the STS database benchmark.

“It is gratifying to see that the drive of our team together with the combination of medicine and science has been able to lower the risk for our patients,” said Michel Ilbawi, M.D., chief of pediatric heart surgery at Advocate Children’s Hospital. “Our team is committed to excellence and has the resources needed to provide high quality care.”

The STS also examines the complexity of operations that the hospital performs. Advocate Children’s Hospital excels in providing innovative solutions for complex pediatric heart problems that most other hospitals in the region are unable to address.

“The team at Advocate Children’s Heart Institute cares for patients with heart issues with exceptional compassion. To have earned the highest national rating from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons is truly evident of the commitment our pediatric cardiovascular surgery physicians make to provide patients with the highest quality of care and clinical excellence,” said David Roberson, M.D., medical director for the pediatric cardiovascular service line and director of fetal cardiology at the hospital.

The cardiac surgery program at Advocate Children’s Hospital is the largest in the state of Illinois, and its team of specialists performs procedures that cover the entire spectrum of heart care from the simplest to the most complex pediatric cardiac conditions.