Daniel J. Penny, MD, PhD

From Dr. Penny

As Texas Children’s Hospital moves along its journey towards preeminence, it will be essential that developments within the Cardiology section explicitly contribute to this strategic goal. It is the ambition of the Cardiology section to make these contributions through a number of advances. These will be to:

Recruit exceptional people. Texas Children’s Hospital has a long tradition of recruiting the best and the brightest. We will continue to make Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine an employer of choice for pediatric cardiologists.

Develop strong and sustainable partnerships with our stake-holders. We believe that our ability to develop strong and sustainable partnerships with our stakeholders is fundamental to the position of exceptional care. We are enhancing our partnerships with professional stakeholders within Houston and beyond. Our partnerships with our children and their parents are fundamental to our care philosophy and we continue to strengthen these.

Achieve superlative and quantifiable outcomes. The Heart Center at Texas Children’s Hospital has always prided itself on the superlative outcomes which can be provided for patients with heart disease. We will continue to build on this exceptional performance. Through the use of informational technologies, we will develop new ways of outcome assessment.

Perform practice-altering research. The past decade has witnessed a transformational change in the research directions related to pediatric cardiovascular care. There has been an emphasis on translational research, with rapid translation of laboratory findings into the clinical arena. There has also been a great emphasis on multidiscipline research such that it is now important that a research program considers all aspects of a child’s life and that of their family. It is our ambition to lead the way in the area of translation of research and also to the pioneers in the area of multidisciplinary outcome based research.

Provide exceptional education for all physicians and other providers as well as our families. Few cardiology units have educated as many leaders in pediatric cardiology as Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine. This educational tradition was developed by Dr. Dan McNamara and we will continue to build on this into the future.