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George Vivacqua

MBA
In 2026, I am answering the call to... bridge clinical excellence and financial stewardship.
Job Title: Business Operations Administrator
Organization: Penn Transplant Institute, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
Age: 38
Years in Donation and Transplantation: 11
What makes your career in organ donation and transplantation special?

There is no field in healthcare quite like organ donation and transplantation. It is one of the only areas of medicine where the operational and financial intricacies of care can often rival the clinical complexity of providing it.
Transplant programs and OPOs across the country are operating in an era of unprecedented change: the implementation of continuous distribution, evolving organ allocation policies, the expansion of normothermic and hypothermic machine perfusion, the growing role of ex vivo organ preservation, growth in living donation, the integration of xenotransplantation research, increasing scrutiny of OPO performance, and a regulatory environment that is reshaping how programs operate. Navigating that complexity requires fluency in two languages at once—the language of medicine and the language of business.
What makes my career special is the chance to bring those two worlds together in service of patients. Behind every spreadsheet, staffing model, and contract negotiation is a person waiting for care, and my mission is to expand access to transplant through innovative financial management and payer strategies that support cutting-edge clinical care.

Biography

George N. Vivacqua III, MBA, serves as Business Operations Administrator at the Penn Transplant Institute (PTI), Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he leads the financial, operational, and strategic functions that allow one of the country’s most established transplant programs to continue to grow and innovate. Leading the financial and operational engine of a complex institute requires fluency in two languages—the language of medicine and the language of business—and that fluency is the through-line of his career.

During his time with the PTI, George was selected as a joint leader in the planning, build-out, and operational integration of the Penn Medicine Donor Care Center, the first deceased donor organ recovery center in the Philadelphia region. He also co-led the creation of the Center for Living Donation at Penn Medicine, a program focused on increasing living kidney and liver donation that helped Penn Medicine set a worldwide record of 100 kidney paired donation transplants in a single calendar year in 2023. First and foremost a patient advocate, George keeps the patient and donor family in view behind every staffing model, contract, and strategic plan.

He was nominated for The Alliance 40 Under 40 by Stacey Doll, Director of Clinical Operations and Transplant Administrator at the Penn Transplant Institute, with additional nominations from four colleagues across Penn Medicine. “Mr. Vivacqua is a technical expert in his field and a true advocate who has helped countless patients overcome insurance barriers to transplant,” Doll wrote.