Lankenau Hospital will shut its five-year-old heart-transplant program next week.
Organ transplants are one of several areas where the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has sought use its enormous financial clout to drive quality improvement.
"In recent years CMS has been more aggressive," said Robert I. Field, chair of the health policy and public health department at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.
"This increased assertiveness has been occurring under a conservative Republican administration and, I think, there is a good chance that the trend will continue or accelerate under the Obama administration," Field said.
Last year, federal regulators began requiring all transplant programs in the nation to undergo on-site surveys to participate in Medicare and Medicaid. So far, 90 of the nation's 240 transplant hospitals have been scrutinized.
Hahnemann and Temple were in that first group because of low transplant volumes in their liver and heart programs, respectively. The results of the inspections were recently released by the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
Temple's heart program - for many years considered among the best in the nation - has failed for nearly three years to reach the federal requirement of 10 transplants in the previous 12 months. So the hospital that performed the region's first heart transplant in 1984 now faces a May deadline to get its numbers up or risk being dropped from Medicare.
At Hahnemann, the liver program also failed to reach the minimum during any 12-month period between Jan. 1, 2006, and Aug. 31, 2008.
And Hahnemann's kidney program faces potential termination from Medicare in May because patients died at higher-than-expected rates.
