The University of Vermont Health Network announced Wednesday that it is now working with Dartmouth Health to provide more seamless access to kidney transplant surgery, which it shuttered in-house earlier this year.
Patients who require a kidney transplant also need significant pre-operative and post-operative care, and the latter can often last years. After the University of Vermont Medical Center stopped providing transplants on March 1, patients in need of the surgery had to seek the full continuum of care outside the network, meaning they needed to drive out of state for each pre- and post-surgery consultation.
The new collaboration with Dartmouth Health means that patients can now receive their pre- and post-surgery care in UVM Medical Center’s Burlington clinics, working with both Dartmouth and UVM physicians, according to UVM Health Network spokesperson Annie Mackin. The transplant surgeries themselves will take place at Dartmouth’s Lebanon, New Hampshire, hospital.
Before it ended the service, the medical center performed roughly 12 kidney transplants each year, said Mackin, a volume that was not enough to cover the costs. The low number of transplants at UVM Medical Center was noted in a health care report commissioned by the state from the consulting firm Oliver Wyman released last year. The report recommended consolidating kidney transplant surgeries in higher volume areas, as one among many ways to make healthcare more efficient and less expensive in the state.
The health network — which includes three Vermont hospitals and three hospitals in New York — announced its decision to end the local surgeries in November 2024. At the same time, it also announced its intention to transfer management of three dialysis centers, which the medical center ran out of hospitals in Newport, Rutland and St. Albans, to those hospitals. However, UVM Medical Center ultimately continued to manage the dialysis services out of these three different regional hospitals because they were unable to take over the costs of services, Mackin said.
As part of the same announcement to scale back services last November, the hospital proposed closing two other clinics associated with Central Vermont Medical Center. Network leadership cited the limits set by the Green Mountain Care Board last September for fiscal year 2025 on how much revenue the hospital can collect each year. One of the clinics, Mad River Valley Health Center in Waitsfield, is scheduled to close Sept. 26, with patients being transferred to the hospital’s family medicine practice in Waterbury.
The annual regulatory review of hospital budgets, recently completed for 2026, is intended to keep healthcare costs in check for patients and insurers. When cuts were announced, care board chair Owen Foster resisted taking the blame, explaining that the network could have cut a number of other costs before cutting health care services.
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