While people on ventilators can go to long-term-care facilities or even home, patients on ECMO must stay in ICUs. Some ECMO patients are awake to talk with family and doctors or do rehabilitation exercises. Sales of ECMO machines, which cost about $150,000, are projected to grow from $228 million in 2022 to $278 million in 2028, according to research company Insight Partners. “You don’t want wards of people dying on ECMO machines," said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. In a study of 370 ECMO patients published in August in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, 70% of patients who survived to 30 days were alive five years later.

Source: Wall Street Journal October 13, 2023 21:45 UTC