Transplant Surgeon Dr. Kristin Mekeel says organ transplantation is at an inflection point due new technologies and changes in regulatory requirements. As a new member of the Board of Directors of the Organ Donation and Transplantation Alliance (The Alliance), Dr. Mekeel says The Alliance will be a key player to help navigate the changes.
“We are at an inflection point in transplantation,” says Dr. Mekeel. “Everything’s changing quickly and we can’t predict what’s going to happen.” Dr. Mekeel left her role as Associate Chief Medical Officer of Surgical Quality at UC San Diego Health (UCSDH) in February to become the Chief Quality Officer at UCHealth in Colorado.
“The Alliance has been an extremely important clearinghouse and discussion arena for groups to come together and have critical conversations,” she adds. “It has become one of the most visible groups in the United States bringing together all the stakeholders in organ donation and transplantation.”
Dr. Mekeel notes that The Alliance’s Critical Issues forum is an important venue for the exchange of information. “It provides an opportunity to have thoughtful conversations about the future of organ donation and transplantation and have the difficult conversations that are sometimes hard to have. It will be essential for transplantation in the next couple of years to continue to both learn and adapt to whatever the future is going to hold.” This year’s Critical Issues Forum will be held October 7 and 8 in Atlanta.
Previously in her role as Associate Chief Medical Officer of Perioperative Services at UC San Diego Health, she was responsible for surgical performance data and analytics, quality public profiles, perioperative quality and safety, professionalism, peer review, adverse event analysis, and performance improvement. She also served as division chief of transplant and HBP surgery for nearly 8 years during which time the program saw tremendous growth in transplant volume while maintaining high-quality transplant care.
Passionate About Quality
Dr. Mekeel’s engagement with quality and patient safety began when she arrived at UC San Diego Health to lead the kidney transplant program and needed to create a performance improvement program. She worked closely with Tamra Magee, the former administrative director of transplant at UCSD. They developed a quality program for the entire transplant program. “We all worked together to make sure that we had best practices,” she says. “We worked to ensure safe care was happening for our patients.”
She went on to earn a master’s degree from Northwestern University in health care quality and patient safety. She was trained in Lean Six Sigma and says the UCSDH team used the improvement process known as DMAIC (Define–Measure–Analyze–Improve–Control).
She differentiates between quality and patient safety and says they are part of the same continuum. “I see patient safety as making sure that the care we’re providing is safe and doing what we can to not have medical or surgical errors that would impact patient care, or even worse cause complications,” she says. “Quality is broader in scope and encompasses all aspects of the patient experience.”
She says the quality process begins with data. “We had a great deal of data about how we’re providing care at UC San Diego Health. We would look at the macro level, such as at the department or division level. And we looked at the individual level as well. Then we would benchmark ourselves against similar academic medical centers to identify where we had opportunities to do a better job to provide higher quality and safer care for our patients.”
“We also did surveys and interviews to see where the patient had concerns that they were not getting high-quality care or good communication.”
Adapting to New Generation of Surgeons
Dr. Mekeel has written about building high-performing teams that account for generational changes in physicians. “Historically, transplantation was definitely a field where you sacrificed yourself for the greater good, and your priority always had to be transplantation,” she says. “As leaders in the transplant world, we need to adapt and understand the new generations of physicians and learn from them. They are interested in work-life balance–that you can be a good transplant surgeon and work hard, but still have a life outside of rewarding work.”
She says changes in communication styles are also necessary. “Instead of being dictatorial, transplant leaders need to engage team members to be part of decision-making. In transplantation, you’re seeing a lot of leaders who are Baby Boomers who were trained in the hierarchical model who are now struggling to lead teams because they aren’t adapting.” (Mekeel is a Gen Xer)
“I approached leadership in my transplant program as a servant leader,” she says. “My approach was democratic, so we make decisions as a group. My job was to do whatever I could to ensure that they were successful.”
Path to Transplant Surgeon
Mekeel grew up in Wisconsin, the second of four children. Her path to becoming a physician began when she excelled at an introductory biology class in college that led her down the medical school track, enrolling at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine in Madison.
She decided to become a surgeon during the surgery rotation in her third year of medical school when she discovered it was a good fit. “I liked it way more than I thought I was going to,” says Dr. Mekeel. “It really suited me. I’m a fast thinker. I’m decisive. And I liked the technical aspects of doing surgery and found it really rewarding. U-W has a huge transplant program, and it was one of the early leading transplant programs in the country,” she says. “I loved the operations, and the surgeons were the smartest people in the hospital.”
She completed her general surgery residency at the University of Colorado and a fellowship in organ transplantation and hepatobiliary surgery at the University of Florida.
Dr. Mekeel is an avid recreational road bicyclist with a love of travel, and has been on bike tours in Europe. She has two cocker spaniels, Harry and Willow, and a passion for Orange Theory fitness workouts. She reads fiction, mostly mysteries. She is also the ‘Fun Aunt’ to her two nieces and two nephews, and even has a bracelet emblazoned with those words to prove it. Trips to Universal Studios in Disneyland are some of their favorite get-togethers; she also goes shopping with her niece, who’s in her 20s and plays Barbies with her seven-year-old niece.
