Keck Hospital of USC’s Chief of Operations Jon Reuter, front left, and Transplant Administrator Pat Stricklin, front right, cut a ribbon during the opening of Keck Medicine of USC’s new liver and heart transplant treatment center Thursday, April 25, 2024.
Friday, April 26, 2024 | 2 a.m.
When Elaine Davey’s newborn was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy about two decades ago, the whole family tested for the genetic condition.
That’s how Davey learned she also had the heart disorder, in which the walls of the left ventricle become thick and stiff.
Davey, 52, received a heart transplant last year after learning her hypertrophic cardiomyopathy had developed into an advanced stage.
Throughout her time waiting for a heart, Davey was on the road often, making the four-hour drive to Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles for preoperative and postoperative care.
The Las Vegas resident has spent thousands of dollars and traveled hundreds of miles for treatment, even on days when she felt sick.
But with the opening of USC’s new transplant treatment center in Las Vegas, Davey and other patients’ days on the road will be lessened. The facility at 2911 N. Tenaya Way opens later this month.
“I’m really, really excited and, you know, it’s just going to be so much more of a convenience for me and all the other transplant patients here in Vegas,” Davey said. “After transplant, you have a lot of great days but you still have a lot of rough days. That’s where my peace of mind comes from, knowing that I don’t have to do all that traveling even when I’m not feeling well.”
Keck Medicine of USC is the state’s first heart transplant treatment center, and it will serve as a hub for pre- and postoperative care for the health institution’s heart transplant patients. Heart transplant procedures aren’t performed in Nevada yet.
Dr. Raymond Lee, surgical director of the USC heart transplant program and mechanical circulatory support, said the team at the Las Vegas transplant care center — sourced from the USC Transplant Institute — would collaborate with local specialists to help coordinate care for patients.
The facility will care for liver transplant patients as well, and officials hope to one day expand into lung and kidney surgery care.
“There’s a lot of great doctors and cardiologists and nurses and people that take care of a lot of sick patients out there, and we want people to know that we are there to help bring just the transplant part of it closer to home — the part that isn’t there — to help support the community, be there and work with our local cardiologists and our local doctors and nurses,” Lee said.
Keck Medicine of USC has hospitals and other specialty practices across the Los Angeles metroplex that offer care for everything from orthopedics to cancer treatment.
Under their Transplant Institute, patients can undergo surgery for kidney, liver, lung and heart transplants as well as a living-donor liver transplant — a procedure where a portion of the liver from a healthy, live person is removed and placed in a patient whose liver has lost function.
Jon Reuter, COO of Keck Medicine at USC, said the institution does about 450 transplant operations a year across those four organ types. Doctors there have seen over 100 patients from Nevada through the years, including those in preoperative and postoperative care.
“With Keck Medicine, there continues to be demand for our clinicians and in our services. There has been and continues to be other services that we are looking at and considering bringing to the market, so this part of a larger strategy for us and in a market for us that we believe has great potential for us to serve at a greater level, so this has been part of a longer-term plan,” Reuter said.
More than 660 Nevadans are in need for an organ transplant, according to data from the Nevada Donor Network, a nonprofit organization that coordinates, recovers and allocates organs for transplantation and research on behalf of donors and families.
Roughly 103,223 men, women and children are on transplant waiting lists nationally as of March and 17 people die each day waiting for an organ transplant, the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration reported. The majority of them — over 89,000 — are hoping to one day get the call for an available kidney, but livers are the second-most in-demand organ and hearts the fifth, behind a combined kidney and pancreas.
There is no heart transplant program in Nevada, and Nevadans seeking these organs must travel to other states, including neighboring California. They must also be close enough to their operating center just in case an organ becomes available, which may mean long stays away from family and friends.
Davey knows all about it. When she was advised about needing a heart transplant last spring, she immediately began doing all of the necessary procedures to get on the waitlist, she said.
Dr. Ajay Vaidya, medical director of the USC Heart Transplant Program at Keck Medicine of USC, explained that “the evaluation process for heart transplants can be a rigorous one.”
Doctors must ensure a patient is “sick enough” and has exhausted all treatment options to even offer a transplant. Then evaluations on the body’s ability to accept the new organ and community support systems available to the patient are done.
“Whenever (patients) are going through that evaluation period, it can be long and they can spend a lot of time away from their family and their communities and their support system, and that can really be an emotional toll on our patients,” Vaidya said. “The goal of this clinic is to treat patients where they are, and so we are offering a therapy that we can directly manage in Vegas by having our team provide care there.”
The preoperative tests took Davey to California frequently, and she eventually had a monthslong stay when a heart was secured.
Although some organ transplant patients spend months or even years on the waitlist, Davey’s operation occurred in December and she was released from the hospital in February, much to the joy of her son, his fiancee and their baby, who was born around the same week Davey received her new heart.
Davey still makes the trek to California for certain tests, but with USC’s new transplant treatment center in Las Vegas, those out-of-state visits will mostly be consolidated into one center — reducing her time on the road and the cost of frequent visits to Los Angeles.
Since 2020, the USC Heart Transplant Program has done 12 left ventricular assist device procedures and 23 heart transplants for Nevadans, according to data shared with the Sun by Vaidya.
There’s an even larger community of patients in the state still waiting for their operation, or who still are in the care of Keck Medicine following past surgeries, Reuter said.
Reuter has already seen referrals from local physicians for patients needing preoperative care, he said, and he’s planning to do even more outreach through the new center.
“It’s a program that has been an important part of our population and community that we have served,” Reuter said. “This is, in part, to better support that (Las Vegas) community that has been growing steadily. We fully expect that this is the start of the journey.”