Allegheny General Hospital is rebounding from problems that have kept its heart transplant program from completing the minimum number of annual transplants required by the federal Medicare program, an official said yesterday.

Physicians have been recruited to boost a program that slowed in recent years, the result of the bankruptcy of the hospital's parent foundation in the late 1990s and, more recently, the lengthy illness of one of its transplant physicians, said spokesman Tom Chakurda.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times published a list of hospitals, including Allegheny General, that did not meet Medicare's requirements in 2005 for completing a minimum number of heart, lung or liver transplants or for achieving certain survival rates a year after surgery.

In an accompanying article, the Times noted that about 20 percent of the nation's federally funded transplant programs did not meet the minimum standards.

Mr. Chakurda said Allegheny General's heart transplant program has continued to meet standards for patient survival.

From January 2002 to mid-2004, 89 percent of the program's heart transplant recipients were alive one year later. The percentage is about what would be expected, according to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, and exceeds the 73 percent standard required to qualify for Medicare funding.

Mr. Chakurda acknowledged that the hospital's program has fallen short of completing the 12 transplants annually that Medicare requires.

As problems deepened in the 1990s for the hospital's former parent foundation, the Allegheny Health, Education and Research Foundation, Mr. Chakurda said Allegheny General had trouble keeping and recruiting cardiologists and heart failure specialists vital to maintaining a large transplant program.

"We were not in the position to counter-recruit," he said. "We were dealing with the perceptions that people had relative to the stability of Allegheny General."

A serious illness affecting one of its two heart transplant physicians several years ago also forced the program to scale back its volume of transplants and refer candidates for transplantation to other centers, Mr. Chakurda said.

In the past five years, Allegheny General has performed six or fewer heart transplants annually, down from nine each year in 1997, 1998 and 1999, 11 in 1996 and 12 in 1995, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.