LISTEN: Intermountain Health has shortest liver transplant wait times in nation, thanks to new tech
Jul 2, 2024, 7:00 AM
Intermountain Health nurse Gabrielle Scott, who specializes in transplants, describes how the new OrganOx machine works. (Emma Everett Johnson, KSL.com)
(Emma Everett Johnson, KSL.com)
Listen to KSL NewsRadio’s interview with Intermountain Health’s liver transplant medical director Dr. Richard Gilroy 👇
MURRAY — A new 167-pound piece of medical equipment has given Sophie Hansen a chance to live again.
“My journey with liver disease started when I was 3 years old,” the 22-year-old said.
Hansen, from Bountiful, has primary sclerosing cholangitis, a chronic, incurable liver disease. When her health started to decline at age 11, her best shot at life was a liver transplant — she spent four years waiting to get one.
After the transplant, she traveled around the world and started a job as a researcher in the transplant department at Primary Children’s Hospital and Intermountain Health.
“This organ allowed me to live an amazing life as a teenager,” Hansen said. But it didn’t last. Her liver disease came back, even faster and more aggressive than before, and she was back on a transplant waiting list not sure how much time she had.
“It’s either a transplant or dying,” said Dr. Richard Gilroy, Intermountain Health’s liver transplant medical director. “We tend not to list people who are going to get better.”
This time on the waiting list was different, Hansen said. Instead of four years, she only had to wait 33 days for a transplant.
The difference wasn’t her health or a sudden uptick in donors — it was Intermountain Health’s new OrganOx. The machine maintains donated livers in a “near-physiological state outside the body,” according to a press release.
Read the full story on KSL.com.
