Colleen Pater, MD, MS

My clinical specialty is acute cardiac care. I treat hospitalized patients with cardiac diseases that significantly affect their blood circulation and oxygen levels. These are patients generally admitted to the hospital for procedures and medical needs such as surgeries, starting new medicines or general pediatrics-related indications.

The practice of pediatric cardiology combines what I love about general pediatrics — the ability to care for children and their congenital diseases — with the medical complexity often found in adults. On the Acute Care Cardiology Unit (ACCU), I have the privilege of working with a great team to care for ill patients during one of the most stressful times in a family's life. We love when we get to see children well enough to go home and then seeing them healthy and leading everyday lives, for example, in a cardiology follow-up clinic or at our annual summertime Camp Joyful Hearts.

I'm also a systems improver working to identify ways to deliver safer and better clinical care within the complex hospital system environment. Quality improvement (QI) allows us to take what we've learned from clinical research and implement it into complex hospital systems to deliver safe, efficient and excellent care.

My academic interests focus on improving the quality of care for hospitalized children, primarily through using QI to optimize the hospital environment and patient outcomes. Some of my QI efforts center on reducing alarm fatigue for the nursing staff and improving situational awareness for continuously monitored patients within our hospital system. We also strive to prevent hospital-acquired infections in the ACCU, such as central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI). Through the Pediatric Acute Care Cardiology Collaborative (PAC3), I'm working with other ACCU partners throughout the country to share learnings and knowledge to improve the outcomes of hospitalized cardiac patients.