Recently I while participating in a conversation about the need to transform healthcare, I began thinking about innovations that have taken place in that industry over the years which got me to thinking about heart transplants.
The first successful heart transplant procedure was performed by South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard on December 3, 1967, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. The patient was Louis Washkansky, a 53-year-old grocer who was dying from chronic heart disease. The donor was Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old who died from a brain injury in a car accident. Her father donated her organs, including her heart, knowing that she loved to help others.
While Washkansky only survived 18 days, as of December 2022 well over 50,000 heart transplants have been performed worldwide with more than 30,000 in the United States.
As of March 2024, according to Guinness World Records, the longest living heart transplant recipient is Bert Janssen a 57-year-old Dutch man. Janssen received his transplant in 1984 at Harefield Hospital in London after being diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a heart muscle disease, at age 17. At the time, heart transplants were not yet performed in the Netherlands, so his cardiologist referred him to the London hospital. As of March 2024, Janssen had lived with a donor heart for 39 years and 100 days, breaking the previous record of 34 years and 359 days set by Canadian Harold Sokyrka in 2021.
A powerful example of the reason and need for our society to continue to look for ways to innovate and transform healthcare and other industries.
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