DDC Clinic Family Heart Center

Our Family Heart Center is dedicated to the diagnosis and treatment of genetic cardiac conditions in children and adults. Focusing on highly specialized care, the center offers affordable testing, early diagnosis and onsite treatment for heart diseases such as cardiomyopathy and Long QT syndrome.

We provide compassionate, culturally-sensitive care to our patients, most of whom are Amish. If needed, an entire family can be seen at the same appointment, and multiple members of a family can be tested on the same day.

Patients diagnosed with cardiogenetic disorders receive personalized care plans tailored to their unique medical needs. Through our partnerships with major medical centers, we also provide access to outside pediatric and adult cardiologists who regularly visit our clinic, enabling our patients to receive comprehensive cardiac care close to home.

Diagnostic Services

The incidence of cardiogenetic disorders in the Amish community is high, and many diseases often go undetected. Our Family Heart Center provides critical testing, early intervention and lifesaving diagnoses to at-risk families.

Among the types of diagnostic testing we use to detect heart disease are echocardiograms, which use ultrasound to check the heart muscle and valves. Echocardiograms are used to diagnose a variety of conditions including cardiomyopathy, valve disease, and blood clots. We offer regularly scheduled “echocardiogram days” twice a month by appointment.

In addition, our in-house laboratory staff is currently developing a cardiogenetic awareness panel, or C-GAP. This new diagnostic tool will leverage the same technology as our genetic awareness panel (GAP) which we regularly use to test for 220 genetic diseases found in the Amish community. CGAP will become an integral part of our Family Heart Center’s diagnostic capabilities, enabling us to use a patient’s blood sample to simultaneously test for a large number of cardiogenetic diseases at the same time, leading to faster diagnoses, earlier treatments and better outcomes.

Research and Education

Beyond patient care, our Family Heart Center is also involved in ongoing scientific research and education. Our DDC Clinic doctors and laboratory staff work with pharmaceutical companies and academic research partners in the study of genetically-based heart diseases and the development of new treatments. What we discover through our research efforts is applied to our patient care and shared with physicians and scientists around the world, benefitting families everywhere.