Orlando Health strikes joint venture with home-health company
Orlando Health has entered a joint venture with LHC Group, a national provider of in-home and community health services, which range from wound care, medication management and nutrition counseling to transportation and errands.
The joint venture will include locations in Orlando, Clermont, Kissimmee, and Altamonte Springs, with three Orlando Health and three LHC Group providers.
LHC will purchase majority ownership and take on the management. The company, which has similar partnerships with 350 hospitals in the country, projects $3.5 million additional revenue from the joint venture, according to a news release.
“This agreement will create for the community the most convenient, responsive, high-quality, and full continuum of care currently available,” said Greg Ohe, senior vice president of ambulatory services at Orlando Health, in a news release.
The agreement will be finalized on Aug. 1, subject to closing conditions.
New heart transplants
AdventHealth has begun “donation after cardiac death” heart transplants.
The health system is the first in Florida, and one of 12 centers in the nation, to perform the procedure, also known as DCD, as part of a clinical trial.
Traditionally, donor hearts are harvested from patients whose hearts are still beating but are considered brain dead. Surgeons are able to assess the function and viability of a beating heart in the donor’s body.
But that’s not the case in a heart that’s stopped beating. A pump, which is the subject of the clinical trial, enables surgeons to procure and revive a heart that has stopped beating and in the meantime assess its function and viability.
“So the DCD donation allows hearts, which were basically just buried before, go for donation and to save lives,” said Dr. Scott Silvestry, principal investigator of the trial at AdventHealth Orlando and surgical director of Thoracic Transplant at AdventHealth Transplant Institute.
Once approved by the FDA, the pump, called a TransMedics Organ Care System, can potentially double the number of heart transplants that AdventHealth surgeons can perform, Silvestry said.
In the United States, more than 300,000 people die each year from heart failure and “we only have access to about 3,000 organs per year,” said Dr. Donald Botta, surgical director of heart transplant at AdventHealth Transplant Institute. “So if you think about only 1% of the people that die for heart from heart failure, have access to organs.”
With the pump technology, “number one, we’re able to save a lot more people. And number two, we’re able to cut down the wait times for the people that do get the transplant so that they’re a lot more healthy when they do get the transplant,” said Botta.
The pump will also allow for longer transportation times from the donor site to the hospital were a recipient is awaiting a new heart.
The technology has been used in the United States to procure liver, kidney and other organs like the lungs, but not the heart. Other countries, including the Australia and the U.K. have been performing DCD heart transplants using the technology for several years.
AdventHealth surgeons performed the first DCD heart transplant last week and said the patient is doing “phenomenally-well,” according Botta who flew to get the donor heart, connected it to the pump and transplanted it in the patient.