Methodist Hospital's extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) program has quickly grown into a regional lifeline, with a 24/7 mobile team, specially outfitted ambulances and a caseload that leaders say is on track to outpace even the pandemic peaks. Crews now head straight to patients' bedsides, sometimes hundreds of miles away and across the border, to stabilize critically ill patients before bringing them back to San Antonio for advanced care. The buildup tracks with expanding transplant and cardiovascular services across South Texas and a push to keep complex care closer to home.
Methodist earns ELSO platinum recognition
Methodist Hospital holds a Platinum Center of Excellence designation from the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization, the highest accreditation awarded to ECMO programs. That recognition reflects benchmarked standards for staffing, training and quality, according to the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization.
Mobile ECMO team extends reach
Dr. Jeffrey DellaVolpe, medical director of ECMO at Methodist, told the San Antonio Report, "As we continue to grow our capability, we just find that there’s more patients that can be helped." The program keeps a mobile ECMO crew on standby that can deploy in as little as 15 minutes and has traveled to places including Las Cruces, Houston, the Lower Rio Grande Valley and into Mexico to place patients on support before transfer. Methodist leaders say the system is on pace to perform roughly 300 ECMO cases this year, a volume that would outstrip even its COVID-era caseload.
New ambulances built for ECMO transfers
In late March the health system launched a dedicated Critical Care and Specialty Teams transport line with four critical-care ambulances designed for complex transfers, including ECMO moves. The program pairs dual paramedic-and-nurse teams and offers ground or air options when appropriate, a rollout the system framed as a way to tighten coordination and clinical consistency during interfacility transfers. Methodist Healthcare says bringing transport operations in house will reduce reliance on external providers and better preserve community resources.
ECMO can save lives but outcomes vary
ECMO is reserved for situations when conventional therapy fails, serving as a bridge to recovery, transplant or durable devices, but survival depends heavily on the underlying condition and on timing. Large reviews show wide variation in outcomes: pooled literature and clinical summaries highlight low long-term survival in some adult cohorts, while a 10-year institutional review in Europe reported an overall three-month mortality of about 41 percent. These data are discussed in specialty reviews such as one published in JACC: Heart Failure and in a 10-year center analysis available through PubMed Central.
Why the numbers matter locally
Methodist's program now operates roughly 33 ECMO pumps, about half of which are configured for transport, an equipment and staffing footprint that makes regional retrievals possible but also costly and time consuming. As the medical director told the San Antonio Report, an ECMO retrieval typically requires a physician, a perfusionist and nursing staff and can keep a team out of service for hours, which is a key reason many centers do not offer bedside ECMO deployment.
Regional context
Listings from the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization show Methodist as San Antonio's only Platinum-level ECMO center, while other local hospitals maintain ECMO capability, a setup that positions the city as a regional hub for high-acuity cardiopulmonary rescue. That concentration helps explain why surrounding communities look to San Antonio teams for transportable ECMO when local resources are limited or when a patient is too unstable for a standard transfer.
Methodist's expansion highlights a broader shift: as ECMO becomes more accessible and programmatic expertise grows, health systems are investing in transport platforms and trained crews so the sickest patients can avoid perilous trips. For now, San Antonio's mix of accredited programs and a 24/7 retrieval team means more patients in the region have a shot at advanced support when conventional therapies fail.
