News - non kidney - Tracking the Decline of a Historic Heart Transplant Program

[iolaire]

ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle have a series of articles about one of the original ground breaking hospitals for heart transplants which now has one of the worst outcomes for transplant recipients in the country.

Heart Failure
Tracking the Decline of a Historic Heart Transplant Program
ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle are investigating troubles at Baylor St. Luke’s in Houston, an illustrious heart program that has recently had some of the worst outcomes in the country.
https://www.propublica.org/series/heart-failure

Its a good scary read. 

I like the ProPublica investigations be it how Walmart's rely on local police forces heavily for loss prevention and thus are a huge burden on small police forces, to how certain police forces enforce laws like jaywalking significantly more in African American neighborhoods, to how industry money reaches physicians.  A lot of their reporting is data driven so they use available datasets like crime statistics, or residential property appraisals in Chicago to identify trends that show bias.

[MooseMom]

This is such a terrible shame; Dr. Cooley performed heart surgery on my grandfather back in the 60s.  My grandparents lived in Louisiana, and my dad brought them over just so that my grandpa could be operated on by the famed Dr. Cooley, so it is so sad to think of that great program now having such problems.

I was particularly bothered by the effort that the hospital made to improve their outcomes by simply removing higher risk patients.  Where do THOSE patients go?  I first listed at Rush here in Chicago, and they told me that other tx centers in town had better stats, but that was because Rush's intake population is one that rarely gets any primary renal care at all.  I went with Rush because I felt that if they could have pretty decent outcomes in such already compromised patients, that was a good thing.

I am a big fan of ProPublica ever since they published their findings of their big dialysis report, another bit of scary reading.

I haven't read the entire series of articles about St. Luke's yet, but thanks so much for posting this, iolaire.