artery disease, or congenital heart defects.
“Most patients with heart failure don’t
need a heart transplant,” says W. Roy
Smythe, MD, chairman of the Department
of Surgery at Scott & White Healthcare,
and the Glen E. and Rita K. Roney
Endowed Chair in Surgery. “Basically
patients with more advanced heart failure
are served in multiple ways by the efforts to
put together a heart transplant program.”
Creating a heart transplant program
was one of Dr. Smythe’s goals when he
arrived at Scott & White in 2004.
Planning began in earnest in 2008 with a
feasibility study to determine whether
Central Texas had a need for a heart
transplant center. The study confirmed this
need. “In 2008, if our program had been
up and running, we would have done
more than 20 heart transplants, which
automatically makes us a medium-sized
A patient undergoes a minimally invasive procedure in the heart catheterization lab.
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