In June 2024, Children’s National Hospital appointed Wayne Franklin, MD, as senior vice president of its Heart Center. Just one year into his tenure, the hospital’s cardiac team achieved a milestone: performing the world’s first partial heart transplant to replace an artificial heart valve with a living tissue valve in an 11-year-old patient.
Dr. Franklin recently spoke with Becker’s about his leadership philosophy, the Heart Center’s strategic direction and how Children’s National is shaping the future of pediatric cardiology on a national stage.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: You oversee a wide spectrum of services within the Heart Center at Children’s National. What are your top strategic priorities in this role?
Dr. Wayne Franklin: As senior vice president of the Heart Center, I run everything related to heart patients here at Children’s National. We see the whole spectrum of life — fetal life, pediatric life and adult life — from the twinkle to the wrinkle, as they say. We also do lung transplants, so we are really more of a heart-lung or cardiothoracic center, if you will.
Our strategic priorities for the Heart Center align with those of the hospital. We don’t want 40 doctors doing 40 different things, we want 40 doctors kind of working towards the same goal.
I’m using a mnemonic for our heart program now that covers the same strategic priorities as the hospital, but in a different way. It’s POWER.
The “P” is for patient and family experience. “O” is organizational finances. We have to take care of our margin or else there’s no mission. “W” is wellness and professional development. We want our employees to be mentally well, physically well while also having good professional development and a runway for growth. I’ve been in healthcare for a long time; what keeps me going is continuing to develop as a professional, a clinician, a clinician-scientist and executive.
“E” is excellence in care. We don’t want to provide average care, we want to be excellent.
The “R” stands for REI: research, education and innovation. Those things are what set Children’s National apart as a health system here. We do really good research, we are educating the clinicians of the future and are innovating to push the boundaries of pediatric healthcare.
Q: What’s your approach to leading a highly specialized and multidisciplinary team?
WF: One thing that I try to do as someone with a broad purview is not only think like a cardiologist, or a surgeon, an intensivist, an anesthesiologist or a pulmonologist. I’ve taken the approach to really communicate, which is an overused term but still key.
So many hospitals are siloed. I’m challenged by the fact that we’re all on the same floor of our hospital. We’re so close together, but unless we really talk we never really know what’s going on.
I make sure that I’m present as well, too. Every day at 7:30 a.m., I go to the ICU to round with the off-going team who’s signing out and handing off to the oncoming team. I’m very committed and invested in clinical care; I want to hear the pain points. If they can’t transfer a patient out of the ICU because there’s not enough floor beds, I can help with that. If there are not enough nurses or a toilet is overflowing, that becomes a me problem. I need to work and fix that so my team can excel and take care of their patients.
That’s what I enjoy doing — operational problem-solving, getting down, rolling the sleeves up, and just hearing from the front-line workers. I’ve really tried to walk in their shoes, or surgical clogs.
Sure, I’m a doctor, but they’re doctors too. They’ve been here for a long time while I’m relatively new. I have to earn their trust.
Q: How do you view the Children’s National Heart Center’s role in the national landscape of pediatric cardiology?
WF: A friend of mine who was in town for a big conference recently told me, “You know, Children’s National are the content experts.” It took someone from the outside telling me that to see the platform we have to distribute a lot of information. We have some fantastic clinicians in our Heart Center that literally wrote the papers on delivering complex heart babies, how to do certain heart operations, adult congenital-type things, etc.
I think there’s a real onus on us to do that. We can’t just hope that people are going to come to our ER or come to our clinic office and get care from us that way. We want to be able to disseminate the information nationally.
We also have a really unique geographic position here in the nation’s capital. I can see the Capitol building and the Washington Monument from my office. I always think about what they are doing down there. They’re making laws, they’re making bills, doing things to lead the country. We can sort of follow along that way, keeping politics aside. We can try to use our expertise and our scientific experience to collectively develop guidelines and clinical parameters and spread them to a greater audience.
A lot of times, the people who speak the loudest get the attention. It’s a really important time in healthcare to be evidence based, factual and scientific about things, rather than just anecdotal and emotional.
As our CEO likes to say, Children’s National is the nation’s children’s hospital. We need to be leading the way for these things. People look to D.C. as the center of the country; I think it’s important to sort of mimic that approach.
Q: Where do you see the most exciting innovation coming from within the Heart Center? Are there specific emerging technologies you’re particularly excited about?
WF: I’ll name three that come to mind.
The first would be the idea of virtual care and telemedicine. COVID made everybody in the world jump into the telemedicine space. But what we really want to do in cardiovascular medicine is use these data points to drive better outcomes.
How do we do that? Case in point, we do a lot of inpatient work and intensive care. We’d like to be able to collect clinical data to then predict when a patient’s going to deteriorate. If we can get ahead of that and say, “You had all these risk factors that point up to being at risk for this, so we’re going to make this intervention,” that will drive better outcomes.
From a surgical perspective, we are very fortunate to be the first program in the country to perform a partial heart transplant of a mechanical valve. Why was that interesting? Well, an [11-year-old] child had a mechanical valve put in earlier in his life, but those don’t grow as the child grows. It’s a mechanical ring; the child is going to outgrow it.
Our very talented surgical team took out the mechanical valve and then put in a live tissue heart valve from a patient who just passed away to re-create a valve that wasn’t there before. The new live tissue valve should then grow with the patient. Innovations like this are really incredible because they open up the field of cardiac care for other patients.
Lastly, we’re really getting better at fetal diagnosis and care. We now have CRISPR technology where we’re able to change a person’s genes to maybe cure disease. The future is bright, it just takes a while to do good science and have good evidence. But that’s what excites me about our field.
