Doing a Volume Business in Liver Transplants – University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

Just earlier this week GE and UPMC were in the new with working together on a new global effort of branding to create centers designed after the facilities here. Branding is a big money maker in health care centers. This story goes in to a bit of detail of how during the last few years how liver transplant surgeries were increased and helped create additional revenue flow to the center, but not without controversy involving the surgeon performing most of the operations.

Questions were related to the livers being transplanted and their conditions, but when you need a transplant you are getting somewhere near the point of having only so much time left, so you have read through and form your own opinion on that matter.

For a non-profit facility though the center makes a lot of money, leases a jet and moved it’s main offices downtown to some very prime real estate.

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center said it would open at least 25 cancer clinics in Europe, Asia and the Middle East in the next decade, with help from General Electric Co.

The big focus for overseas ventures has cancer facilities right at the top of the list. BD

Earlier this decade, UPMC made an aggressive bid to reclaim its leadership by hiring an innovative surgeon named Amadeo Marcos, who promised to double the number of liver transplants the hospital did. Dr. Marcos delivered on his pledge. In doing so, however, he resorted to practices that some colleagues found questionable. To overcome a perennial shortage of organs, he used more livers from older donors. He transplanted some of these into relatively healthy patients for whom the risk-reward calculation was less certain. He used partial livers from living donors, and then understated complications from the controversial procedure.

Dr. Marcos's nearly six years at UPMC coincided with rapid growth at the medical center. UPMC is one of the nation's most financially successful nonprofit hospital systems, with operations ranging from Pennsylvania to Ireland and Qatar. Even though three-quarters of its $7 billion in annual revenue is exempt from federal and local taxes, UPMC has acquired many of the trappings of large, for-profit corporations.

"For the first time in years, we had people dying on the operating table or in the ICU," says Dr. Doyle, now director of surgical critical care at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. At times, according to him, patients healthy enough to walk into the hospital before being transplanted died "because they had a high-risk liver put into them."