For the first time in two decades, Orange County residents awaiting liver transplants will have an opportunity to undergo their procedure closer to home.
Hoag announced today that it will be launching an organ transplant center that could begin performing liver and kidney transplants as early as next year, pending regulatory approval.
“We want to provide access across our community here in O.C., so that people don’t have to get a life-saving procedure away from their support system and their community,” said Dr. Kenneth J. Chang, Hoag’s James & Pamela Muzzy Executive Medical Director Endowed Chair in GI Cancer and executive director of its Digestive Health Institute.
Hoag will be building on a robust program for pre- and post-transplant care that the hospital system has developed over the past five years, Chang said, with hepatologists who have been tending to patients who had to travel outside the area to undergo surgery at different hospitals. Currently, Hoag refers 40 liver transplant candidates every year to one of the five transplant centers in Southern California. Some patients have had to travel to Arizona for the procedure.
“We have the clinical foundation, multidisciplinary expertise and care model in place. The next step is bringing those capabilities together to deliver comprehensive transplant care here at Hoag,” Chang said.
Over the next year, Hoag will work on obtaining the necessary regulatory approvals, hospital officials said, and build out the new institute, recruiting surgeons, doctors and nutritionists. The hospital will start with liver and kidney transplants and expand to other organs in the future.
Dr. Aaron Ahearn, the new surgical director of Hoag’s liver and kidney transplant program, recruited from the USC Keck School of Medicine, said the hospital will operate on just 10 to 20 patients the first year as part of a trial phase. The team plans to ramp up to 50 to 70 liver transplants a year, he said.
“Developing a robust organ transplant center has been an important focus for our team and builds on our legacy of clinical excellence, underscoring our commitment to delivering the highest quality, personalized care to the communities we serve,” Robert T. Braithwaite, Hoag’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “This program ensures families can access world-class care close to home.”
Orange County, home to more than 3 million people, has been without a liver transplant center since 2005, when UCI Medical Center closed its program. The UCI Health system still operates the county’s largest kidney and pancreas transplant program.
San Diego County, which has a population size similar to Orange County’s, boasts two liver transplant programs.
Meanwhile, alcohol-related liver disease has more than doubled in the past 20 years, particularly among women, adults 45 and older and those living in poverty, according to a 2025 report from Keck Medicine of USC. Liver cancer could double by 2040, another 2025 study said.
The demand for liver donors, as a result, has risen sharply. Thousands die every year while waiting for an organ.
That mismatch between demand for transplants and available donor organs is particularly stark in California, Ahearn said. “Partly, that’s because the needs of the patient population are so much greater. Also, people in California are healthier, so we have fewer available donors.”
But there are reasons to be optimistic, Ahearn said: major innovations in storage technology over the past few years have vastly expanded the pool of donor organs, leading to a drop in waitlist deaths.
“We’re finally making progress and moving in the right direction,” he said, “but obviously we still have a really long way to go before we’ve fulfilled the need.”
Ahearn joins Hoag’s Digestive Health Institute, based at its Sun Family Campus in Irvine and one of three specialty centers that are part of the campus’ $1 billion expansion — construction on six new buildings is expected to be complete this year.