Stanford Health Care’s Lung Transplant Program offers specialized pulmonary care in San Luis Obispo. The Center for Advanced Lung Disease opened in 2024 and sees patients with advanced lung disease and those who are lung transplant candidates.

“San Luis Obispo is an outlying community, which can complicate medical care for an aging demographic,” explains Ian Britton, MD, a clinical assistant professor of pulmonary, allergy, and critical care medicine and a resident of the San Luis Obispo area. “Our clinic partners with local referring physicians to identify patients in need and provides them with prompt, appropriate care. For elderly patients, it takes a village to appropriately manage advanced lung diseases, whether through preparation for or recovery from a transplant or targeted treatment of a particular condition. We work with referring physicians to provide integrated care.”

The clinic is accepting referrals for patients who have:

• COPD
• Cystic fibrosis
• Interstitial lung disease
• Lymphangioleiomyomatosis
• Pulmonary hypertension
• Sarcoidosis
• Severe bronchiectasis
  

Dr. Britton and Deborah Levine, MD, FCCP, FAST, lung transplant specialist and clinical professor of medicine, collaborate to provide expert pulmonary care. Patients at the Center for Advanced Lung Disease in San Luis Obispo receive:

• In-person evaluations by Stanford Medicine physicians
• Evaluation for potential transplant candidacy or eligibility for clinical trials or advanced therapies
• Employment of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to facilitate transport to Stanford Health Care’s main campus

For local patients with advanced lung disease, access to specialized care generally requires extended travel times to regional centers. In some cases, this can be difficult or impossible, depending on the severity of the patient’s condition.

“Our goal is to remove barriers to health care experienced by vulnerable patients in the community, especially those with lung disease,” says Dr. Levine. “We’ve formed a strong partnership with local physicians to identify those patients who need specialized lung care or a lung transplant evaluation.”

Coordinated lung transplant referrals

Stanford Medicine faculty offers innovative pulmonary therapies and access to clinical trials. When patients are in end-stage lung disease and other treatments aren’t working, we can evaluate them as potential transplant candidates at the San Luis Obispo clinic. Those eligible for lung transplantation have access to Stanford Health Care’s world-renowned Lung Transplant Program.

“If a patient completes the lung transplant evaluation at the San Luis Obispo clinic, they are placed on a waitlist. While they wait, we can provide pre-transplant care to keep them healthy before their lung transplant,” explains Gundeep Dhillon, MD, MPH, medical director of the Heart-Lung and Lung Transplant Program at Stanford Health Care. “We’re uniquely positioned to offer the best possible care in these complex situations. By providing services to underserved communities, we focus on making advanced care available to as many patients as possible.”

To learn more, please visit the Lung Transplant Program at Stanford Health Care or one of our four clinics (Palo Alto; San Jose; Henderson, NV; and San Luis Obispo).