Baylor St. Luke’s hires surgeons, administrator to revive struggling heart transplant program
Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston has hired two new cardiac surgeons and an administrator in an effort to revamp a heart transplant program that recently lost Medicare funding due to poor patient outcomes, the Houston Chronicle and ProPublica reported.
Kenneth Liao, MD, PhD, will join St. Luke’s in January after spending the last several years as the top heart transplant surgeon at the University of Minnesota Medical Center in Minneapolis. He will be the hospital’s senior cardiac transplant surgeon as well as chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and mechanical circulatory support.
Alexis Shaffi, MD—previously of the University of Kentucky Transplant Center—joined the Houston hospital in September and has already taken over as the surgical director of heart transplants, according to the report. The two physicians are taking over leadership positions previously held by Jeffrey Morgan, MD, who remains employed at St. Luke’s but is no longer the surgical director for heart transplants and mechanical circulatory support.
St. Luke’s also announced the hiring of Deborah Maurer, RN, to the newly created position of vice president of transplantation. She has more than 25 years of experience managing transplant programs and will be in charge of overseeing clinical and administrative operations for all of the hospital’s organ transplant programs, as well as regulatory compliance.
“The addition of two expert surgeons and an experienced executive who specializes in transplant program administration demonstrates Baylor St. Luke’s continued and growing commitment to heart and lung transplants,” St. Luke’s president Gay Nord said in a press release announcing the hires.
“These changes are a good indication that the senior administration is committed to rebuilding the program,” Alexander Aussi, a San Antonio-based transplant consultant, told the Chronicle and ProPublica. “Given that they recruited really a star surgeon and made these other changes, that’s obviously a commitment from senior administration to move the program forward.”
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Daniel joined TriMed’s Chicago editorial team in 2017 as a Cardiovascular Business writer. He previously worked as a writer for daily newspapers in North Dakota and Indiana.