The moment Dr. Tarik Kizilisik hooked up the kidney in Lutheran Hospital Operating Room 16, the Jackson 5’s 1970 hit “ABC” began playing over the room’s speakers.
“ABC, it’s easy as 1,2,3, as simple as do, re, mi …”
The transplant surgery Dec. 13, which took a healthy kidney from Michelle Doehrman and implanted it in her mother, Sally Pomeroy, was indeed carried out without a hitch — the 118th kidney transplant since the Fort Wayne hospital began performing the procedure in 2007.
That program, now up to 119 procedures, and the 27-year-old heart transplant program, which has recorded 275 procedures, are arguably two of the more high-profile services offered at Lutheran — successful services that one executive said position Lutheran as a highly advanced health care facility.
And now Lutheran is on the verge of expanding the geographical reach of its transplant programs and may add a third transplant procedure: dual kidney/pancreas transplants.
“There is some interest in doing pancreas transplants,” said Lutheran Health Network CEO Joe Dorko. “But we need to get through the due diligence.
“If we find there are enough people leaving the market, leaving the region for (pancreas) transplants, then I’d be willing to look at it. If the community need is not there, then we’ll wait a year and continue to re-evaluate.”
Dual pancreas/kidney transplants are usually performed on people who have Type 1 diabetes and are preferred over pancreas-only transplants, which have lower survival rates, according to the American Diabetes Association.
Dorko said Lutheran Hospital has held off adding pancreas transplants while establishing a record of success with kidney transplants.
“The idea is: You start something and you want to be good at it,” he said. “And you want to get that solid foundation.”
Lutheran is also in the early stages of setting up a northwest Indiana transplant clinic in Valparaiso with Porter Health System, which is owned by Lutheran Health Network parent Community Health Systems.
Lutheran Health Network, which includes Lutheran Hospital, currently serves 23 counties in northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio.
Dorko and Dr. Joe Ladowski, heart transplant program director at Lutheran Hospital, said the idea behind the Porter Health project is to see if there is a sufficient number of potential transplant recipients in that region. Those patents would receive their transplants at Lutheran and, said Ladowski, Lutheran specialists would travel to Porter to assist with follow-up care.
The arrangement would be grounded in the same philosophy that has guided Lutheran transplant programs from the start: making transplants more convenient for residents in areas served by Lutheran so patients don’t have to travel to Chicago or Indianapolis or Ann Arbor, Mich.
Serving community needs closer to home is at the root of Lutheran’s transplant programs, Dorko said, not the bottom line or crafting a more prestigious image.
“This may sound corny,” he said, “but the answer comes back to doing what is right for the community. When we look at why people leave the community to receive services — like Indianapolis or Ann Arbor or other areas — you think, ‘Geez, what can we do?’”
Kizilisik, the music-loving director of the Lutheran Kidney Transplant Center, added: “Now, (patients) don’t have to travel great distances. They come here.”
Kizilisik, Dorko and Ladowski said having the transplant programs at Lutheran also has the added benefit of creating a halo effect that suggests Lutheran Hospital’s other services are uniquely advanced.
“When you look at it from an outside perspective,” Kizilisik said, “if you learn that a hospital is doing transplants, automatically that tells you that the hospital has a high level of care. The hospital is more sophisticated. It can do more complicated things.”
The ever-improving outcomes in transplants only heightens that perception.
Kizilisik said Lutheran has a 100-percent success rate in transplanted kidneys working properly in patients. Several decades ago, he said, the success rate nationally was about 50 percent.
Ladowski, meanwhile, said 50 percent of Lutheran heart transplant patients between 1985 and 1992 lived 10 years or more after their procedures, which is about on par with international rates.
Advances in technology and immunosuppressant medications have helped spur improved outcomes, Kizilisik and Ladowski said, but the real need — a need that has lingered for decades — is securing more donors.
Lutheran spokeswoman Lizette Downey said the median waiting time for a kidney transplant at Lutheran is 19.6 months; 4.9 months for a heart transplant. Those are better wait times than the national medians of 50 months and 5.3 months, respectively, but any wait poses risks to patients.
“People are dying waiting for transplants,” Kizilisik said. “The message we should give is that there is a need for organs.”
Said Ladowski: ”A donor organ is not something that you can just reach up on a shelf and find. There needs to be more in the way of awareness.”
In the case of kidney transplants, surgeons have increasingly relied on living donors versus non-living donors. Heart transplant surgeons don’t have that option.
The absence of a sufficient supply of donor organs is a major factor in hindering the growth of transplant programs, and that, in turn, is robbing some families of miracles like the one experienced by Sally Pomeroy and Michelle Doehrman.
“And transplantation is a miracle,” Dorko said. “You’re taking a living part of one body and putting it in another body. It just amazes me.”
