See how one transplant center was able to effectively manage 67% increase in referrals without adding staff.

How the University of Utah Health’s Transplant Center removed bottlenecks in care and opened its doors to more patients.

Utah Health’s Transplant Center has aided those facing organ failure since 1965 when their kidney transplant center first opened. The Salt Lake City-based Center performed the world’s first permanent artificial heart replacement in 1982. In addition to leading edge kidney care, the Center performs lung, pancreas, and heart transplants, drawing regional patients from multiple neighboring states.

Like many transplant centers, the care team at University of Utah Health’s Transplant Center fights daily battles against time.

“With chronically ill patients dealing with the challenges of end-stage disease and transplantation, there’s a very long list of medical records we need to gather before their first evaluation,” explains Kim Phillips, Senior Director, Transplant Service Line at University of Utah Health’s Transplant Center.

Sixty percent of patients at Utah Health’s Transplant Center are from outside of Utah. “Out-of-state patients are often five to seven hours away, and many are from small towns with small hospitals that do not have electronic medical record systems, compounding delays in document retrieval even more.”

“Historically the bottleneck in our process occurred before the patient could even arrive for an evaluation. We would get stuck for months and months waiting for records to come in. It was a major barrier to efficiently moving people through the process,” Phillips adds.