If you or a loved one needs a heart transplant, it’s reassuring to know that caring experts are ready to support you through the journey. The team at the University of Florida Health Shands Transplant Center has more than 30 years of experience in advanced heart failure therapies and heart transplantation techniques. We focus on the unique needs of each patient, providing advanced medical treatments with sensitivity and concern.

The UF Health difference

As a patient in our heart transplant program, you benefit from our experience and expertise.

Experience

The cardiovascular surgeons at the UF Health Shands Transplant Center performed their first heart transplant in 1985. Since then, the collaborative heart transplant team has performed more than 1,180 heart transplants. Our decades of experience have taught us that every patient’s journey to heart transplantation is unique. Our experts collaborate to develop personalized plans of care for each individual, assessing each patient’s medical condition, values and wishes as they cope with the challenges of living with congestive heart failure. The UF Health heart transplant team is proud to be the primary referral center in the Southeast for high-risk heart failure patients, including those with congenital heart disease and patients in need of combined organ transplants such as heart, lung, liver and kidney.

Expertise

Our doctors conduct research and clinical trials to develop advanced heart transplant surgery techniques that are not offered anywhere else. Our transplant team is also a regional resource to physicians and other medical professionals.

Heart transplant services

• Heart failure: This program focuses on the evaluation and treatment of patients across the entire spectrum of congestive heart failure syndromes at all stages. This includes expert disease management programs for the most common causes of heart failure as well as specialized clinics for rarer diseases that require additional treatment considerations.
• Ventricular Assist Device (VAD) Program: Led by Mustafa M. Ahmed, MD, this program uses leading-edge devices to assist the heart when waiting for transplantation or as a permanent solution. We are a Joint Commission Disease Specific certified VAD center.
• Heart transplant: This program combines the expertise of cardiovascular surgeons to perform the surgery and cardiologists to care for transplant recipients and their new hearts long after. Our experts have years of experience and longstanding success using every available tool and strategy to optimize patients’ survival and quality of life while the team finds the safest and most efficient possible path to a successful heart transplant, always exploring other treatment alternatives when indicated.

Outcomes

• View our heart transplant program's outcomes.

Insurance

UF Health is contracted with most transplant networks. Check with your employer or insurer for more information about accessing UF Health for transplant services or call our financial representative Sam Cerrato at (352) 594-6951 with any questions. View a list of accepted insurance at UF Health.

Make a gift

Help support our heart transplant patients by making a gift.

• Shands Heart and Lung Transplant Program
• UF Health Patient and Family Transplant Housing

Sign up to be an organ donor

Today, more than 5,000 patients listed at Florida transplant centers await lifesaving organ transplants. You have the power to Donate Life. Sign up to become an organ donor!