Reading Hospital Denied Transplant Certification

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

A federal agency has denied Reading Hospital and Tower Health's request for certification of an adult kidney and and adult liver transplant programs.
The denial came in a three-page letter from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services which stated that the two programs "did not meet the requirements for participation in the Medicare Organ Transplant program for Adult Kidney and Adult Liver only."
The letter from CMS Manager Roxanne Rocco also states that the hospital does not meet the requirement for consideration due "mitigating factors."
Tower Health officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The letter cites a March visit to the facility in which surveyors found 17-pages of deficiencies in the two programs.
The federal denial came even as Tower Health, which owns Reading Hospital, had embarked on a extensive advertising campaign touting its transplant program. The ads cited Tower's takeover of the transplant program at the shuttered Hahnemann Hospital.
The Tower Health web site refers to the programs as "the nationally recognized kidney and liver transplant programs."
The deficiencies cited in the March inspection report cites the fact that the hospital hadn't performed a single transplant despite a requirement that applicants perform at least three transplants in the 12 month period preceeding the application.
Other deficiencies include the failure to remove unqualified patients from a transplant waiting list.
Still other failures include failure to maintain medical records of patients "transferred from a discontinued program" and failure to establish a quality assurance program.
Tower did recently announce that an initial adult kidney transplant had been successfully performed.