Piedmont Healthcare has announced plans to launch a lung transplant program at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, creating only the second such program in a state of more than 11 million residents. The health system says services are expected to become available in fall 2026, giving Georgia patients with end-stage lung disease a long-awaited in-state alternative to traveling elsewhere for surgery and follow-up care.
According to WSB-TV, patients and their families currently travel out of state for lung transplant surgery and the extended follow-up care that comes after it, a burden the new program is designed to ease. Piedmont says the effort is also driven by a stark supply problem: more than half of transplantable lungs donated in Georgia leave the state for transplantation elsewhere, according to Piedmont Healthcare.
A Team Built Around ECMO and Complex Cases
The program will be led by three specialists — including surgical director Christian Bermudez, along with Juan Salgado and Enrique Diaz Guzman — who together bring more than 60 years of combined experience treating advanced cardiopulmonary disease, the health system says. The team has extensive experience with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, a technology that supports a patient's heart and lungs from outside the body while they recover or await transplant.
That expertise matters because patients with acute respiratory failure and those on ECMO support are often turned away by other lung transplant programs, per the same account. Piedmont's team hopes to extend eligibility to exactly those groups, leaning on an ECMO program that has treated more than 2,000 patients and is described by officials as among the busiest in the world.
Filling a Gap for Patients Declined Elsewhere
Piedmont says the new program will provide another transplantation option in Georgia for patients who have already been declined by other programs. Bermudez said the program will give those patients another option for lung transplantation in the state, adding that Piedmont's expertise, transplant capabilities and pulmonary care network position it to provide personalized care for high-complexity patients.
Lung transplantation is often the last available treatment for severely damaged lungs, and diseases like pulmonary fibrosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cystic fibrosis can all cause the kind of severe lung damage that leads patients toward transplant. Nationally, roughly 3,000 lung transplants are performed each year in the United States, even as nearly 5,000 people remain on waiting lists at any given time, the article notes.
Building on Piedmont's Advanced Lung and Heart Programs
The new lung transplant effort will complement Piedmont's existing Advanced Lung Disease program, which the health system says provides comprehensive, multidisciplinary care for patients with complex lung conditions. Piedmont is also recruiting an advanced practice provider for what it calls its Thoracic Rescue, ECMO & Lung Transplant Program, a role that would cover transplant evaluation, waitlist management, transplantation itself and post-transplant follow-up, according to a listing on Piedmont Careers. The listing describes the broader effort as a comprehensive, multidisciplinary program focused on advanced thoracic disease, extracorporeal life support and lung transplantation.
Piedmont Atlanta CEO Patrick M. Battey called the launch a significant milestone for the hospital and its patients, and said Piedmont is excited to support the transplant team's mission to save lives. The move follows a strong year for Piedmont's transplant surgeons more broadly — in 2025, they performed more than 100 heart transplants, more than any other health system in Georgia, per the health system.
