Heart Transplant Pearls

Heart Transplant Pearls is a practical bedside guide created for acute care APPs, nurses, fellows, and clinicians caring for heart transplant recipients.

Designed for rapid review during rounds, handoffs, and changes in clinical status, this guide translates complex transplant concepts into focused assessments, recognizable patterns, and actionable clinical pearls.

Inside, you’ll find:

• Denervated-heart physiology and its bedside implications
• Early postoperative priorities, including primary graft dysfunction, RV failure, vasoplegia, tamponade, and bleeding
• Heart transplant rhythm and conduction pearls
• Maintenance immunosuppression monitoring and common toxicities
• Calcineurin-inhibitor trough interpretation and major drug interactions
• Acute cellular and antibody-mediated rejection phenotypes
• Simplified biopsy and pathologic AMR categories
• Donor-specific antibodies, AlloMap, and donor-derived cell-free DNA
• Infection prevention and evaluation
• Common non-rejection complications
• A comprehensive APP rounding checklist
• Urgent transplant-team escalation triggers
• High-yield one-line pearls for quick bedside reference

Created by Tina Chaphe, AGACNP-BC, MSN, CCRN, TCRN, Heart Transplant Pearls combines clinically meaningful detail with clear formatting, visual learning tools, and real-world acute care perspective.

This educational resource is intended to support—not replace—clinical judgment, transplant-team consultation, current institutional protocols, medication labeling, or individualized patient care.