How Academic Medicine Built a National Powerhouse in Less Than a Decade

Consider William again: In many hospitals, a surgery of that complexity would mandate transferring the baby to another city. But here, because the program was built as part of an emerging academic health system, the team already included leading experts who wrote the book on complex cardiac procedures. Fraser himself was the national principal investigator for the multicenter trial that led to the Berlin Heart device receiving Food and Drug Administration approval - the only trial ever conducted in pediatric heart failure.

Turning Austin Into a Hub for Pediatric Heart Care

The Texas Center for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease is still young, founded in 2018. And yet in just a few short years, it has grown into one of the nation's premier programs for congenital cardiac care.

Across the country, less than 10% of congenital heart surgery programs earn a three-star rating from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons - a distinction the center achieved in just five years. Pediatric heart transplant programs typically take decades to build to national prominence, and even among long-established centers, few have the capacity to perform groundbreaking procedures.

"What we're building here is unlike anything else in Texas, in part because we're leveraging the talent and strength of the state's top public university," says Z. Leah Harris, M.D., physician-in-chief at Dell Children's Medical Center and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Dell Med. "Our faculty don't just care for patients - they teach, they innovate, they train the next generation of pediatric leaders. It's a learning health system that improves with every case and gives every child the benefit of not just one doctor, but an entire academic community."

The program's outcomes speak for themselves: Mortality rates have dropped well below national benchmarks, even as surgical volume and complexity have grown since the program's founding. The team now regularly treats patients who were turned away elsewhere, including those requiring first-in-state pediatric procedures such as partial heart transplant. In 2023, doctors at Dell Children's performed one - just the seventh of its kind ever completed worldwide.

Defining the Future, One Patient at a Time

For years, Austin has been the largest U.S. city without an academic medical center. Families in Central Texas routinely had to travel to Houston, Dallas or beyond for complex care, with as many as 1 in 4 Austinites still leaving the region for serious medical needs.

As rankings rise and recognition grows, the pediatric heart program's trajectory reflects more than individual achievement. It points to what an academic medical center anchored by Dell Med will become: a new kind of health system for the region, and a national model for what's possible when research, education and care are unified by a shared purpose, accelerated by tech and innovation at a Tier 1 research university.

"The vision here isn't just to be excellent today - it's to build a system that will continue to push the goalpost for excellence," says George Arnaoutakis, M.D., associate professor at Dell Med and himself a pioneer of adult cardiac care. Arnaoutakis, recruited in 2023, directs thoracic aortic surgery and cardiovascular surgery quality and outcomes and is surgical director of the transcatheter valve program at the Institute for Cardiovascular Health - the adult counterpart to the Texas Center for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease. "The digitally enabled health system we're building, designed to support care possibilities we haven't even imagined yet, will deliver world-class, tech-driven solutions that bring patients what they need most: hope and healing."