Newswise — The Advanced Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplant Center at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital has become one of only 96 adult and six pediatric heart transplant centers in the nation approved by Medicare.
"Heart failure is the only cardiovascular disease process increasing in prevalence, with more than 500,000 new cases of heart failure per year in America, and it is growing exponentially," said Paul J. Mather, M.D., Director of the Advanced Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplant Center in the Jefferson Heart Institute, and Associate Professor of Medicine, Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University. "There is a critical need for centers of excellence like Jefferson's to provide skilled care and treatment." "Medicare based its decision primarily on evidence that shows that Jefferson's program meets or surpasses criteria for certification by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid," says Thomas J. Lewis, President and Chief Executive Officer of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. Medicare certification allows heart transplant centers to receive federal reimbursement for heart transplant operations on Medicare beneficiaries. "Medicare approval of the heart transplant program at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital provides another vital resource for the thousands of Medicare eligible beneficiaries both regionally and nationally that require heart transplantation, and for the additional tens of thousands of non-Medicare patients in need of this therapy," said the center's Surgical Director of Transplantation Scott Silvestry, M.D., assistant professor of Surgery, Jefferson.
In the past three years since the heart transplantation program was approved by the Board of Trustees at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the program has performed 24 heart transplants and treated more than 3,000 patients.
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