Dustin Money, Senior ECMO Specialist at UVA Health, has been appointed the inaugural chair of the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO) Registry Quality Committee.
Dustin began his career at UVA 17 years ago as a respiratory therapist. He later became involved with UVA’s ECMO program and now oversees UVA’s ECMO data reporting to the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO)—the world’s largest registry of ECMO data.
ELSO is an international nonprofit consortium of healthcare institutions, researchers, providers, and industry partners. The organization supports those delivering extracorporeal life support through continuing education, guidelines, research, publications, and its comprehensive patient data registry.
What is ECMO?
Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) involves pumping blood outside the body to a heart-lung machine that removes carbon dioxide, adds oxygen, and returns blood to the patient. By temporarily taking over the work of the heart and lungs, ECMO allows these organs to rest and recover. It is used for patients facing life-threatening heart and lung conditions such as pulmonary or cardiac collapse where survival without ECMO would be unlikely. In many cases, ECMO serves as a bridge to recovery or advanced treatments such as transplantation.
At UVA, Dustin reviews every ECMO patient case and submits the data to the ELSO registry. This work helps identify opportunities for improvement, generates institutional benchmarks against peer programs, and informs research. UVA is one of only 46 programs worldwide recognized as a Platinum ECMO Center of Excellence.
Recently, ELSO established the Registry Quality Committee, appointing Dustin as its inaugural chair. During his two-year term, he will lead quality improvement initiatives, with a focus on enhancing the Quality Improvement (QI) Dashboard, a critical tool used by ECMO providers to benchmark and analyze outcomes.
Currently, the dashboard captures basic metrics such as mortality and complication rates but is underutilized by many centers. Dustin hopes to make the platform more user-friendly, expand its capabilities to include more detailed data, and integrate AI-powered risk adjustment models. These improvements would also allow centers to pull and analyze their own data, giving institutions clearer insight into their opportunities for growth.
The use of ECMO has grown rapidly: more patients have been treated in the last decade than in the previous 30 years combined. However, challenges remain, including equipment shortages and limited communication between centers. Strengthening the ELSO dashboard, Dustin says, is key to ensuring ECMO is used effectively.
Collaboration is central to his vision. UVA is currently partnering with Virginia Cardiac Services Quality Initiative (VCSQI) to bring together ECMO programs across the state, encouraging shared data, best practices, and collective problem-solving. “We can’t do ECMO in a silo,” Dustin emphasized. “Our participation in ELSO shows UVA’s commitment to top-tier patient care, as well as transparency and holding ourselves accountable.”