For months, officials at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center have declined to specify the factors behind a rash of patient deaths in the hospital’s heart transplant program three years ago.

But a newly released federal document describes program leaders as more blunt in their assessment when regulators questioned them privately in December.

In an interview with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, one of the hospital’s top heart transplant physicians blamed the program’s struggles, at least in part, on “a retiring surgeon” — a “legend” — who “wouldn’t stop performing transplants,” according to typed notes prepared for CMS.

Credit by - Pro Publica

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