Megan Bell, Associate Director of Abdominal Transplant at Cedars-Sinai Comprehensive Transplant Center, says that the sharing of best practices among the community of organ transplant administrators nationally is highly collaborative. “We all have the same goal: let’s get these patients transplanted,” says Bell.
Bell puts her penchant to share best practices into action with her work with The Alliance. She attended The Alliance’s National Transplant Administrator Leadership Summit in 2024 and will be involved in planning the meeting in 2026 as a member of The Alliance’s National Transplantation Leadership Council. “At the Transplant Administrator Summit everyone comes together to share information about common issues. We all want to see these issues solved so we work together.”
She is also a faculty member of The Alliance’s Conversation Series. In June 2024, she presented a Conversation Series webinar “CMS FY2024 IOTA Proposed Model: Changes in Donation and Transplantation” and earlier this year she moderated the 2025 SRTR Annual Session: Using SRTR Data to Monitor Transplant Program Performance. Both sessions are available on-demand on The Alliance’s website.
She also currently serves as a member of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) Membership Professional Standards Committee and has chaired the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) Region 5 annual Educational Collaborative.
Transplant Community Nationally is a Family
“The sharing of best practices is so important, and there’s not a week that goes by that I’m not reaching out to a colleague at UCLA, USC, San Diego, or Arizona asking, “Hey, what are you guys doing? How are you making this work?’ The transplant professional community is a big family where we all work together.”
“Transplant is a hard field to work in,” she continues. “It’s highly regulated. It’s intense. You have the sickest of patients on the recipient side. On the donor side, you’re working with families and managing hospitals and transplant center requests. If you stay in transplant, it’s because you really want the patients to get transplanted.”
“At the end of the day, your goal is for a patient to be transplanted successfully, whether you’re on the OPO or the transplant side. You have to work together because it is so intense and there’s so much that goes into it.”
Path to Donation and Transplantation
Bell worked as an ICU nurse from 2003-05 after graduating from Azusa Pacific University Nursing School. Her preceptor advised her to always ask to be assigned the most difficult patients to jumpstart her learning. She says one of her hardest cases was a patient with a gunshot wound to the head who went on to become an organ donor. The first night, she worked to stabilize the patient and when she returned the next evening, he had been declared brain dead.
“I was amazed watching the OneLegacy coordinator speak with the family,” says Bell. “He told them, ‘Now is your opportunity to give something and make something positive come out of this horrific tragedy.’ My entire focus changed once the family agreed to donation. I was still caring for the patient, but I was working alongside the OneLegacy coordinator to keep the patient’s labs good to preserve the organs for transplantation.”
A few months later, the OneLegacy coordinator returned to Bell’s unit to do some education and gave her team a letter that documented how many organs had been placed from that donor. Bell was hooked on organ donation and transplantation.
In 2005, she joined OneLegacy as a donor coordinator and in 2006, she moved to the recipient side of transplant and joined the UCLA internal on call team and then became the supervisor of the On Call Kidney Transplant team.
Proud of Creating an On Call Team at USC
In 2017 during one of the UNOS Region 5 Educational Collaboratives, she met with Tamra Magee who was at USC at the time. Magee recruited her to start an internal call team at USC. She was hired as the manager of organ allocation and donor triage to build, implement, and run a call team.
“I had to work very closely with surgeons and physicians to get them to trust that I knew what I was doing and could manage call and hire a team,” says Bell. “We had four months to hire and train five nurses and five donor allocation specialists and we went live in July 2018. It was a completely remote team, so we trained them at my house.”
Bell said the experience of building an internal on call team from the ground up is one of the proudest achievements of her life (right up there with her three children). “I loved building that call team. They’re a fantastic group and many of them are still working there.”
She said she is contacted frequently by colleagues from other transplant centers asking for information about how she trains the coordinators and about the work processes of the on-call team. “I’m always willing to share information because it’s going to help another center have the ability to grow their program.”
In 2021 she enrolled at Vanderbilt University and at the same time was promoted to Director of Clinical Operations at USC where she oversaw all solid organ transplant programs. After receiving her MSN Acute Care Nurse Practitioner degree from Vanderbilt in 2023, she was recruited to Cedars Sinai as the Associate Director of Abdominal Transplant.
In her current role, she oversees all clinical aspects of abdominal transplants as well as the on-call team. Although her role is primarily administrative and often focused on staffing models and budgeting, she says her strong clinical background enhances her ability to work with nurse practitioners and physician assistants and understand their workflows.
The Cedars-Sinai Comprehensive Transplant Center and the Smidt Heart Institute set a record in 2024 by completing 682 solid organ transplants—the most the medical center has performed in a year. Cedars-Sinai is among the top 10 transplant centers in the U.S. by volume, according to published data from the OPTN, and is known for accepting complex, high-risk cases.
“We’re continuing to work on getting patients through quicker from that initial appointment all the way through to listing and transplant,” says Bell.
An Unplanned Journey to Nursing
Bell never imagined herself in nursing. Diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age 10, she became well acquainted with health care but resisted being defined by her illness. When her parents encouraged her to attend a children’s diabetes camp, even offering a family trip to Hawaii as incentive, she declined — a trip she notes she still has never taken. Her parents later suggested nursing as a career, yet Bell’s early passion was storytelling. She loved to read and write and served as editor of her high school newspaper.
In college, she remained undeclared for two years before deciding to explore nursing by enrolling in an anatomy course. “I loved it and decided to go into nursing, but I said I’m not going to work with diabetics,” she says. “I’ll separate that out. Then I ended up working in transplant, where 30 percent of people with Type 1 diabetes end up needing a kidney transplant.”
Family, Roots, and Mentorship
Bell and her husband, a high school guidance counselor, have been married for 21 years and are raising three children, ages 18, 15, and 12. All three play water polo, which means much of Bell’s free time is spent at pools for practices and games.
Family travel has also played an important role in their lives. Taking advantage of her husband’s summers off and her own remote work opportunities, they have embarked on road trips across the country, exploring destinations such as South Dakota, Wyoming, and Seattle while visiting national parks along the way. This year, their travels will take them to Nashville as they help their oldest daughter begin nursing school at Belmont University.
Bell’s ties to her hometown of Glendora, California remain strong. She grew up there as the middle child of a police sergeant and a 911 dispatcher and still lives nearby. With an older sister, a younger brother, and 12 first cousins who attended the same schools, she was surrounded by a close-knit extended family that continues to shape her sense of community.
Throughout her career, Bell has also benefited from the guidance of mentors, including Tamra Magee at USC, as well as Missy Forrest, Heidi Berliner, and Anne Gabriel at UCLA. She carries with her a favorite quote attributed to Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” For Bell, the words reflect both her approach to leadership and the nature of transplant work. “When I look at how the call team was run at USC and how it was run at UCLA and how I’m running it here at Cedars, it’s always been the absolute best that I’ve known how to run it. But then you learn, and you adapt until you know better, and then you change things. That’s very common in transplant. We’re all just doing the best we can and then you learn better and then you make changes.”
