the hospital staff and patients. Kevin B. Churchwell serves as the hospital's current CEO. The International Center at Boston Children's Hospital serves over 2,500 patients from more than 140 countries. Services provided including coordination of visits, medical records, travel, accommodation, and immigration. The hospital offers a global medical second opinion program in partnership with Grand Rounds, Inc. In 2019, Boston Children's Hospital was ranked the top pediatric hospital by U.S. News & World Report for the sixth year in a row. Boston Children's was the first stand-alone pediatric hospital in New England to be awarded Magnet status by the American Nurses Credentialing Center. Boston Children's Hospital is home to the United States' first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program. History Children's was founded on July 20, 1869, by Dr. Francis Henry Brown, a Civil War surgeon, who traveled to Europe in 1867 to study the pioneering specialized approach to treating children. Brown was impressed with the treatments he witnessed and he wanted to bring that level of care to Boston. Brown opened a 20-bed facility in a small townhouse at 9 Rutland Street in Boston's South End. Approximately one year after opening, the hospital was moved to the corner of Rutland and Washington Streets. Children's Hospital stayed at this location until 1871 when the hospital moved to Huntington Avenue before its final move to what would become the Longwood Medical and Academic Area. In 1891 Thomas Morgan Rotch, Children's chief physician, established the nation's first laboratory for the modification and production of bacteria-free milk. Before the establishment of this laboratory, breast milk was often the carrier of many deadly diseases that children were especially susceptible to. Harvard Medical School affiliated itself with Boston Children's in 1903. Boston Children’s Hospital moved to an area of more than 130,000 square feet on Longwood Avenue in 1914, where the Ebenezer Francis farm was located. The cost of the area was $120,000. Dr. William Ladd, a doctor with Children's, devised procedures for correcting various congenital defects such as intestinal malformations in 1920, launching the specialty of pediatric surgery. Dr. Robert E. Gross, a surgeon at Children's and later a professor of child surgery at Harvard Medical School, performed the world's first successful surgical procedure to correct a congenital heart defect with the "ligation of a patent ductus arteriosus" in 1938, ushering in the era of modern pediatric cardiac surgery. Dr. Sidney Farber, pediatric pathologist,