CLEVELAND — Cleveland Clinic is celebrating several significant accomplishments in its mission to save lives and provide care to patients across Northeast Ohio and elsewhere, announcing doctors across the hospital system performed a total of 1,039 organ transplants in 2021.
That number is up 18% from 2020, according to officials. It also marks a major accolade for Dr. Charles Miller, who took over the Clinic's enterprise director of transplantation in 2018 and has since worked to unify the three transplant sites at Main Campus, Florida, and the United Arab Emerites.
"First and foremost, we want to thank organ donors and their families who make the gift of life possible," Miller said in a statement. "The growth of Cleveland Clinic's global transplant programs comes from a shared mission and culture based on best practices, standardized processes, quality outcomes, innovation, and teamwork at each of our sites."
Diving into the numbers, the Clinic says it performed 210 liver transplants among Ohio patients in the past year, the highest number in the history of the program. The system's statewide liver and intestine transplant operations were also the largest in the entire United States, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
Main Campus also undertook 58 living-donor kidney transplants and 33 living-donor liver transplants. The latter surgeries were all done laparoscopically, and Cleveland Clinic is "one of the few hospitals in the world to offer that minimally invasive procedure."
During 2021, the Clinic also expanded its Organ Repair Center and achieved milestones at its Florida and U.A.E. locations. Donation stories from the system can be found here.
