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ECMO, which stands for Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation, is an advanced technology that functions as a replacement for a critically ill child's heart and lungs. It's used to support a child who is awaiting surgery, or to give a child's vital organs time to recover from heart surgery or disease. The ECMO Program is housed within the hospital's Medical-Surgical Intensive Care Unit. Here, a multi-disciplinary team of cardiac intensive care unit physicians, nurses and specially trained respiratory therapists provide customized ECMO care for each child they treat. Specialists in pediatric infectious diseases, pulmonary disease and pediatric neurology also are readily available to help manage and monitor cardiac ECMO patients.

Hemophilia is an inherited bleeding disorder in which the blood does not clot normally because of a missing or dysfunctional clotting protein. Clotting proteins, also called clotting factors, work with other blood components such as platelets, von Willebrand factor, and other proteins to form a blood clot. When any of these components is absent or low, increased bleeding can result. If clotting factor VIII (8) or factor IX (9) are affected, this bleeding disorder is called hemophilia.