Few patients understand that the number of transplants performed plays a crucial role in keeping surgical teams sharp, or that they can significantly increase their chances of survival by going to transplant centers that do the risky surgery more often. And, obviously, that's critically important if you happen to be one of those lives. Such centers accounted for about half of those doing heart transplants in the United States, but they performed only 15 percent of all heart transplants. The study, which examined the outcomes of 7,893 heart transplants between October 1987 and 1991, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1994.
Liver transplants require greater technical ability on the part of the surgical team.
We try not to focus on this because we end up polarizing the transplant community. But we believe poorly performing programs should be looked at. For each type of organ transplant, roughly half the centers in the country fell into the low-volume category. Low-volume centers accounted for 9,049 organ transplants, or about 16 percent of the total transplants in the analysis. Experts say patients and their families should know the most recent mortality rates for the centers they are visiting, as well as the median waiting time for the needed organ.