The story of the Howard University Transplant Center: (a project of the people).

ABSTRACT

It took almost two years for Howard University Hospital to receive certification as a kidney transplant hospital under the federal government's end-stage renal disease program, although Howard had a transplant program that was comparable to many in the country.By the time the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare approved Howard's program, many successful transplants had already been carried out there, largely on indigent patients who probably could not have received transplants elsewhere or on patients whose chances of survival, because of other complications, were so risky that other hospitals had turned them down. At first the high cost of these operations had to be absorbed by the University since the government reimbursed only those hospitals which had an approved transplant program.Howard has now received reimbursement (payments of more than $500,000) for its transplants because its certification was granted retroactive to July 1, 1973, when the federal program was started. So the Transplant Center is now enabled, and committed, to provide the best possible transplant care to the Washington, D.C. community which, incidentally, has one of the highest incidences of kidney failure in the country.