[Read the Times investigation into North Carolina Children’s Hospital.]

The data, for four years through December 2018, showed that the hospital’s mortality rate for pediatric heart surgery was higher than those of most of the 82 hospitals in the United States that publicly report such data. The death rate at the North Carolina hospital was especially high among children with the most complex heart conditions — nearly 50 percent, the data shows. Those are the types of cases that some doctors had urged the hospital to temporarily stop handling in 2016 and 2017.

UNC administrators previously denied that there were any problems affecting patient care in the heart surgery program, saying only that there had been difficult team dynamics at the time of the doctors’ warnings, and that they had since been resolved by staffing and leadership changes.

Concerns about the quality of pediatric heart surgery programs have been noted at hospitals across the country. At least five programs were suspended or shut down in the last decade after questions were raised about their performance. At least a half-dozen hospitals have merged their programs with larger ones to achieve more consistent results. And more institutions are considering such partnerships.

After the Times article was published, the North Carolina secretary of health opened an investigation into the children’s hospital. In addition to an on-site investigation that finished on Friday after more than two weeks, state regulators have reached out to former UNC medical staff, asking to meet and interview them about concerns they had while employed there.



A spokeswoman for the state health department said it would submit a report to federal regulators from The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services within 10 business days.

