Expanding Options for Liver Transplant Patients

Johns Hopkins Surgery
July 23, 2015

Dr. Philosophe heads an initiative to provide Johns Hopkins liver transplant care in the Washington, D.C., region.

Liver transplant candidates or patients with liver and biliary diseases in the Washington, D.C., area who want to be treated at The Johns Hopkins Hospital but don’t want to travel to Baltimore now have new, viable options.
The hospital’s liver team now offers medical care at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C.,  Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, and at three outpatient clinics in the D.C. region.

“The goal,” says Surgical Director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center, Benjamin Philosophe, “is to provide world-class treatments with an academic approach for our liver patients throughout the system.”

All of the services provided at the Comprehensive Transplant Center at The Johns Hopkins Hospital—except for the actual surgery—are offered at the regional sites. Patients can receive therapies for advanced liver disease and liver tumors, get clinical evaluation and lab work and review of pathological and radiologic studies, undergo evaluation for organ transplantation, access clinical trials for chronic liver disease and liver transplantation, and receive follow-up care after procedures.

The transplant hepatologists at the facilities are all full-time Johns Hopkins faculty. Some work primarily at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and rotate to see patients in the other locations, while others primarily treat patients in the D.C. region and see patients in Baltimore.

With full teams of interventional radiologists, medical oncologists, and transplant and hepatobiliary surgeons, as well as nurse navigators to help facilitate communication between sites, “the partners in our system now manage the complex care of liver patients just as we always have at The Johns Hopkins Hospital,” says Philosophe.

To refer a patient: 410-614-2989

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According to the latest Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients report, the one-year patient survival rate after a liver transplant at The Johns Hopkins Hospital is the highest in the region: 94.1 percent. National average: 90.8 percent.