Charlotte hospital breaks its own record for heart transplants. Here’s how it happened.
Atrium Health’s heart transplant team could potentially double its number of patients thanks to a new technology that keeps a heart beating outside the body, doctors on the team said at a news conference Friday.
“It’s an amazing technology, and we have an amazing team,” said Dr. Joseph Mishkin, advanced heart failure transplant cardiologist at Atrium Health’s Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute.
Atrium Health can now save the lives of people in need of a transplant who live as far as 1,000 miles from Charlotte, compared with 500 miles before the team deployed the new portable technology, said Dr. Eric Skipper, cardiothoracic heart transplant surgeon at Sanger.
When a heart is removed from a deceased donor, the device revives the heart and keeps it beating, infusing it with the donor’s blood, Skipper explained.
A human heart has a four-hour cold storage limit, but the new device keeps the organ viable for up to eight hours, the specialists said.
Atrium Health’s team has conducted several transplants since deploying the TransMedics Organ Care System device a month ago, officials said.
The team so far has performed 30 heart transplants this year — breaking the team’s record for a single year, Atrium Health spokesman Tim Calahan told The Charlotte Observer.
As more hearts became available for transplant thanks to the new device, Atrium Health had to reschedule the news conference several times recently, officials said.
The team also can now accept “higher-risk” hearts, including from older donors and donors initially put on life support before care is withdrawn, according to an Atrium Health news release.
Doctors were previously limited to accepting organs from donors who’d suffered immediate brain death, Mishkin said.
“We now can accept organs from donors who have suffered an irreversible brain injury but do not meet formal brain death criteria,” he said. “In these instances, the family has decided to withdraw care. The donor’s organs can now be a life-saving gift for others.”
The device also will help tackle the nation’s shortage of donated organs, Mishkin said.
The U.S. has a waiting list of more than 3,300 people needing a heart transplant, including 95 in North Carolina, Atrium Health officials said, citing the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
Mishkin said he expects the new technology will “transform the transplant industry, increasing the national donor supply and helping us transplant more patients in need.”
This story was originally published September 10, 2022 at 6:00 AM.