Over the past year, the Pediatric Acute Care Cardiology Collaborative (PAC³) has expanded to include 32 sites across North America, made up of leaders and programs aiming to advance acute care in the field of pediatric cardiology.

The group was formed three years ago with the mission of improving the quality, value and experience of inpatient cardiac care in partnership with other national medical collaborative organizations and national parent advocacy groups. Prior to that, no organization existed with the sole focus of studying the pediatric cardiology care provided within hospitals outside of the intensive care unit.

“Pediatric cardiology care is increasingly complex as we manage patients with both chronic and novel care needs,” says Nicolas Madsen, MD, MPH, director of the Heart Institute’s Cardiac Step-Down Unit and co-chair of PAC³, along with pediatric cardiologist Alaina Kipps, MD, of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, Stanford. “This collaborative allows member organizations to leverage each other’s expertise and understanding so that we can improve care at a local level.”

The last year has seen PAC³ achieve:

• The creation of a registry to formally track acute care patient data
• A formal relationship with the organization that tracks data targeting the cardiac ICU (PC⁴, the Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Consortium), with both registries housed in the same location for optimal cross-populating and sharing
• The launch of the group’s first multicenter quality improvement effort to reduce chest tube duration after cardiac surgery with the goal of reducing length of stay
• The completion of a unique and comprehensive practice variation survey across all members of PAC³ to examine how centers practice, to standardize where appropriate and to spread learnings for the purpose of making local improvements
• A partnership with the National Pediatric Cardiology Quality Improvement Collaborative (NPC-QIC) to create an acute care cardiology learning lab

The ultimate aim of this group is to improve care with their combined clinical, research and advocacy expertise in a way that is thoughtful, validated, sustained and shareable.

Says Madsen, “Because the majority of pediatric cardiology patients spend time in the hospital outside the ICU, we are motivated to both better understand and contribute to improving clinical care in a systematic way.”