2024 Enterprise Zone Impact Report

At Children’s Colorado, research is central to our mission. For many of our young patients, research discoveries and novel treatments are game-changing in their health journeys and offer real hope to their families. Your support is crucial to advancing new research and fueling breakthroughs that will inform the future of pediatric healthcare.

Each year, the Colorado Child Health Research Institute (CCHRI) makes grants to support promising research projects. In spring 2024, the CCHRI supported 10 investigators, including several early-career researchers, with nearly $1.5 million in funding. One-third of these projects were funded through philanthropy, greatly expanding the number of projects launched.

These awards position the hospital as an excellent place to conduct academic research and to train the brightest minds in pediatric medical science. The CCHRI consistently receives more research applications than it can fund, making philanthropy essential in launching groundbreaking projects and advancing the careers of the scientists driving them.

Our Center for Children’s Surgery performed nearly 30,000 procedures in 2024. Your support sustains operational excellence in pediatric surgery, while fueling innovations that improve outcomes for kids in our care.

For example, the Orthopedics Institute at Children’s Colorado depends on cutting-edge technology, including robotic surgical tools like the da Vinci robot, made possible through generous philanthropy. Innovations in surgical technology are transforming patient care, leading to increased surgical accuracy and less invasive procedures. For our patients, this means faster recovery times, less pain and better outcomes. Our orthopedic surgeons have performed more than 4,500 orthopedic surgical procedures, including more than 500 robot-assisted spine surgeries.

Having surgical tools like a da Vinci robot makes an incredible difference in our patients’ surgery experiences. Thanks to your generous support, pediatric surgical procedures continue to become less invasive, less painful and more effective than ever.

At Children’s Colorado, our teams are focused on integrating mental health care into every part of the work we do. Your investment in pediatric mental health is helping build the strong foundation needed to continue improving mental health outcomes for children of all ages.

In 2024, our team made significant strides in redesigning our crisis and acute care services for patients and families. We renovated facilities, implemented new protocols to improve the safety of patients and team members and established uniform processes for more accurate diagnoses and treatment plans.

As a part of this plan, our experts launched a crisis care clinic for youth ages 10-17 and their families directly referred from our Emergency Department (ED). Using a new model, treatment begins in the ED with a dedicated psychiatric provider team. Our incredible teams have improved care transitions for mental health patients to ensure successful movement from hospital settings to community-based care, so that wherever patients enter the care system, they get the help they need throughout their mental health care journey.

The Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders (CCBD) at Children’s Colorado boasts one of the best pediatric hematology/oncology teams in the world. Our incredible physician-scientists are on the brink of groundbreaking new treatments and cures. Your support for cancer research helps our physician-scientists deliver better care by developing more effective, less invasive treatments for pediatric cancer. In 2024, CCBD was once again ranked as, one of the top 10 pediatric cancer programs by U.S. News & World Report; the only nationally ranked program within a 1,000-mile radius of our hospital on the Anschutz Medical Campus.

Philanthropy plays an essential role in advancing research toward new cures and treatments. A powerful example is the pioneering research conducted by Rajeev Vibhakar, MD, a pediatric neuro-oncologist at Children’s Colorado and the Dr. Nicholas Foreman Endowed Chair for Neuro-Oncology Research. Several years ago, he received a philanthropic seed investment from the Morgan Adams Foundation, which fueled studies that led to a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. With this funding, Dr. Vibhakar has made revolutionary strides in treating lethal childhood brain tumors like Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) and exploring ways to reduce the side effects of cancer therapies.

Precision medicine is changing the way pediatric health care is implemented, diagnosed and treated. With a high-resolution map of the human genome, precision medicine identifies both the inherited genetic makeup and the patient’s unique genetic alterations that can influence their wellbeing and inform precise treatment mechanisms that personalize care for each patient. In September 2024, Children’s Colorado’s Precision Medicine Institute’s in-house whole–genome sequencing lab opened its doors.

Generous philanthropic investments enable us to securely organize, and store clinical sequencing data produced in the lab, making it accessible to researchers. Donors also supported the development of a sophisticated data model — built in collaboration with leading pediatric research centers — that evaluates treatment effectiveness based on patients’ genetic profiles, diagnoses and tumors.

Through advanced modeling and analytics, these efforts help uncover new genomic-disease associations, identifying specific genetic variations linked to diseases. Philanthropic investments in 2024 were critical to advancing this life-changing and unprecedented work.

Established in 2016, the Center for Innovation’s mission is to transform health care for kids through innovation. Harnessing the expertise and ingenuity of our providers and connecting them with leading health care and technology companies, we can drive the new products and treatments that will make a difference for children’s health. These innovations are brought to market through incredible collaborations with medical experts, startups and venture specialists.

In one incredible example of success through this fund, our experts developed a medical device to offer patients and their families a better way to manage gastrostomy button (g-button) complications. The resulting device, known as the Button Huggie, has won several innovation awards, including Children’s Colorado’s Center for Innovation Challenge in 2019 and the Shark Tank challenge at the 2022 North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (NASPGHAN) annual meeting.

A randomized, controlled clinical trial comparing the Button Huggie to standard tape and gauze for securing new g-buttons is now enrolling patients at Children’s Colorado, as well as Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, Phoenix Children’s Hospital and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford.

As the largest pediatric heart institute in the region, Children’s Colorado treats more than 20,000 patients each year. Since 2020, our internationally recognized experts have performed more than 675 heart surgeries, with a survival rate close to 98%. For the most complex cardiac surgeries, our success rate is higher than the national average. Your support of our Heart Institute is key to continuing to lead in world-class cardiac care for kids.

Philanthropy has empowered Shelley Miyamoto, MD, Selby’s Chair in Pediatric Cardiology and the Jack Cooper Millisor Endowed Chair in Pediatric Heart Disease, to conduct innovative research, validate key findings and secure larger grants. As a result, she has received nearly $2.3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the State of Colorado and the American Heart Association, enabling her to expand her lab and advance research with far-reaching implications for children with congenital heart disease and cardiomyopathy.