How VUMC put Nashville on the map for transplant innovation: 'The Vanderbilt decade'

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Source: The Tennessean
Author: Hadley Hitson
Date: July 7, 2024

Transplant doctors tell patients "no" every day.

Sometimes they say: "You’re too well for the procedure" — even with a diagnosis like heart failure. Other times: "Your case is too advanced with low odds for a proper recovery."

Gianna Paniagua's doctors in Pennsylvania said it was just too risky for her. So, she sought a second opinion at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Guess what? Facing a life expectancy of four months, she finally heard the magic word: “Yes.” 

For Paniagua, her Vanderbilt doctors became the people who knew her best.

“I was not made to feel like I was high risk. I was not made to feel like I was a lost cause,” she said. “Vanderbilt made me feel like I had the family that I had always been searching for in an adult center.”

In the last eight years, a series of events led Nashville's health care industry to become full of nationwide leaders in transplant surgeries — both in total volume of procedures and in pioneering research.

Vanderbilt’s transplant center is one of the busiest in the U.S. Its doctors performed 739 transplants in 2023, landing the hospital among the top five largest transplant centers in the country. 

The number of transplants in 2023 eclipsed the hospital’s previous record of 645 transplants in a single year, set in 2021. In fact, the record has regularly been broken since 2017 because Vanderbilt doctors now perform 60% more of the procedures than they did seven years ago.

Over the last three years, Vanderbilt surgeons have averaged about 140 heart transplants a year, surpassing every other center in the world some years.

Meanwhile, Nashville-based HCA Healthcare leads the country in performing the most live donor kidney transplants, and Meharry Medical College runs innovative programs driving diversity among transplant surgeons and donors.

The difference between being good and being one of the best? Vanderbilt lead heart transplant surgeon Dr. Ashish Shah said it’s in finding a way to help patients other hospitals won’t touch, like Paniagua.

“It's a small number, but it's the number that I think separates us from other programs,” Shah said. “Do we really think that we can't do this? Because if we can't, they're going to die. That’s a moral responsibility for us.”