Howard M. Nathan, CEO of Gift of Life Donor Program in Philadelphia.
Call it a 10-peat.
For the 10th consecutive year, Philadelphia-based Gift of Life Donor Program — with the successful coordination of life-saving organs from 565 organ donors in 2017 — ranked as the country’s leading organ procurement organization. The donations resulted in 1,546 organs transplanted.Both numbers are national records that help strengthen the Philadelphia region’s status as a leading provider of advanced medical care. Gift of Life works closely with 130 acute-care hospitals and 15 transplant centers across its region.“Philadelphia has become a place where people come for a transplant,” said Howard M. Nathan, president and CEO of Gift of Life. “Temple and Penn, together, did more lung transplants (a combined 224) than anywhere else last year. There’s no question Philadelphia has become a mecca for transplants because of the expertise of our surgeons and their teams and because of the volume of donors in the region.”Transplant surgery is big business for the region’s 11 transplant centers, which generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues providing the procedures as well as pre- and-post surgery care for patients. Advertising by hospitals with transplant centers has picked up recently as medical centers seek to grow their presence in the service line.
“It’s competitive and I think it’s always been fairly competitive,” said Dr. Larry Kaiser, president and CEO of the Temple University Health System, of transplant surgery. “There is only a finite number of donors.”
Kaiser performed the first lung transplant in this region at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he started Penn Medicine’s lung transplant program, in 1991. He made increasing the volume of advanced medical procedures — such as transplants — a priority for improving the Temple Health System’s fiscal health after he was hired to lead the North Philadelphia-based health care provider in 2011.