The patient had been pronounced dead and the organ recovery process had just begun, the House committee letter said.
The chief executive of an organ donation organisation in New Jersey ordered staff to continue harvesting organs from a patient who had shown signs of life, House committee investigators charge.
The allegation is contained in a letter sent to the president and chief executive of the NJ Sharing Network, Carolyn Welsh, by United States House ways and means committee chairman Jason Smith (Republican-Missouri) and Representative David Schweikert (R-Arizona), the subcommittee chairman.
The NJ Sharing Network, an organisation that co-ordinates organ recovery and donations in the state, has engaged in “egregious actions”, and potential violations of state and federal laws, according to the letter released today.
Welsh and NJ Sharing Network did not respond to requests for comment after the release of the letter.
The 12-page letter is based on documents and conversations with nearly a dozen whistleblowers and cites evidence of an array of questionable practices by the organisation.
They involve pressuring patient families into approving organ collections, allocating organs to recipients out of order of the national waiting list and discarding 100 pancreases in a single day.
Most prominent of the allegations is the charge that Welsh advised staff earlier this year to go ahead with an organ recovery at Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden even after “the patient reanimated”, according to information gathered by the committee.
“You told … staff on site that they should proceed with the recovery,” according to the letter addressed to Welsh.
The patient had been pronounced dead and the organ recovery process had just begun, the letter said.
When the patient showed signs of life, staff contacted Welsh, according to the letter.
“It is the committee’s understanding not only that the … staff on site continued to pressure the hospital staff to proceed with the donation, but also that you were the individual who made the decision to continue with the process of donation,” according to the letter.
“The committee further understands that you - someone with no clinical experience - decided to proceed from outside of the hospital, even while the hospital staff on site shared concerns about your decision.”
Eventually, hospital staff intervened and the organ recovery was halted, according to the letter.
Whistleblowers also told the committee that documentation in the case has been deleted or manipulated.
The hospital did not respond to a request for comment.
The committee leadership’s letter is expected to add to the controversy surrounding the nation’s organ donation system, a complex bureaucracy supporting the multibillion-dollar business in transplants.
In 2022, a Senate Finance Committee report blamed 70 deaths on mistakes in the screening of organs and noted widespread deficiencies in the system.
Earlier this year, US Government investigators found that at least 28 times, an organ procurement group serving Kentucky and parts of West Virginia and Ohio may have initiated organ recovery before the patient was confirmed dead.
“The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy jnr said in July.
Most recently, a wide-ranging whistleblower lawsuit was unsealed in which an industry veteran with experience at several transplant centres and organ procurement groups alleged that the way the US collects and distributes lifesaving organs has been corrupted by greed, lax oversight and methods designed to maximise payments from Medicare.
The lawsuit brought by Patrek Chase said that the NJ Sharing Network, where he once worked, was one of three organ procurement organisations so focused on maximising reimbursements that they collected hundreds of organs that were not viable for transplant because the guaranteed Medicare reimbursement for kidneys gives them a financial incentive to do so.
Chase and other investigators say that they are bringing to light problems in the organ donation system that must be resolved to restore public confidence.
“Continued oversight and investigation … is necessary to ensure trust in the organ donation system, transparency in Medicare reimbursements and assurance of patient safety,” according to the letter.
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