"We were at a wedding when we got the call,” says kidney recipient Janet Giannini, who received a transplant four months after being added to the waiting list at Nebraska Medicine, following more than four years on a list in California. “The bride had just come down the aisle and your area code came up. I thought the transplant coordinator must have a question or something."
That same spring of 2016, Rami Elmasry, also from California received the call, after four months on the waiting list in Nebraska Medicine’s region.
"Forget a year, forget two years, a few months is a miracle," he says.
Both these recipients routinely tell others who need a kidney that they should consider coming to Nebraska Medicine for the extremely short wait times and expertise of the transplant team at the Lied Transplant Center. That’s not surprising, considering most areas of the country measure their wait list times in years, not months.
Visit the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, if you’d like to see how long you’ll wait at Nebraska Medicine based on your blood type and other factors, compared with the rest of the United States.
In the same report you’ll see we transplant more than 150 kidneys a year while maintaining a better than average patient mortality rate.
Apply for our wait list, or see a map that shows you a list of lowest wait time hospitals for kidney and liver transplants based on the data above.
Extraordinary Kidney Transplant Care
While the wait list got them to consider flying here for a kidney transplant, it’s the care Elmasry received that sealed the decision for Nebraska Medicine specifically, versus other programs with similar short wait times.
"I felt very comfortable out there. Everybody was super pleasant, super nice," Elmasry says.
Giannini echoes Elmasry’s sentiments. "Everybody who came in the door knew exactly what they were doing," she says. She still orders all her medications from Nebraska Medicine, in addition to flying here each year for her checkup, precisely because the transplant team and pharmacists here have impressed her so much.
Another Way to Shorten Your Time on the Wait List
Nebraska Medicine also offers a robust Living Donor program, built on the notion that we want to do everything possible for you to find a living donor instead of having to wait months or in some states years on the donor list. To that end, we've successfully connected together large groups of living donors who in exchange for providing a kidney to someone else, were able to help get a kidney for a loved one he or she wasn't a match for.