It’s not always patience and luck that get patients off the organ transplant waiting list and into the operating room. Unlike in many areas of medicine, experts say there’s a lot of variation in the US transplant system. Knowing there are differences and what to ask might help, per the AP. It can be difficult to learn how to navigate that search, but there’s publicly available info about which hospitals perform the most of each type of transplant, plus their waiting times and outcomes. Long used by experts analyzing the transplant system, the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, or SRTR, database has new patient-friendly tools developed in the hopes that more would-be transplant recipients will use it. “People are making these really high-stakes decisions without understanding the options,” said Dr. Allyson Hart of Minnesota’s Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, who helped design the tools. More:
Different transplant centers have different criteria: There are about 100,000 people on the US transplant list at any given time, the vast majority of whom need a kidney, with just over 49,000 transplants performed in the US last year. Each transplant program’s waiting list is linked to a national automated matching system. Organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, enter information about viable organs into that system, which generates lists of possible matches at multiple hospitals in order of priority. When the OPO offers an organ, the transplant team must quickly decide if it’s a good choice for that patient, or the offer moves to the hospital with the next-in-line candidate. Some hospitals are more conservative than others about which organs they’ll accept, said Dr. Syed Ali Husain, a kidney specialist at NYU Langone Health. How to find data about transplant centers: Typically, a doctor or other health worker points patients to the nearest hospital offering the kind of transplant they need. But the SRTR database allows people to compare transplant centers around the country in multiple ways. Search for a particular organ and a list of the highest-to-lowest-volume centers pops up, with dials to show how they perform on such measures as getting a transplant faster, survival on the waiting list, and the new organ’s survival. Click on those of interest for more data. For certain organs, there’s a “personalized decision guide” to customize the search a little more with demographic and medical information that compares outcomes for patients similar to you. It’s OK to quiz the transplant team: Some people choose to “double list” at a hospital closer to home and another higher-volume transplant program further away. While not everyone is able to travel, the search tools can also help inform discussions with your chosen transplant program. More here.
