In an effort to make sure organ transplant matches are fair, the Department of Health and Human Services has launched a new public online tracking tool.
“Since the beginning of transplantation, there has always been a shortage of organs, not enough to go around for all the people who could benefit,” said Dr. Thomas Fishbein, executive director of the MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute.
He said the newly launched dashboard from the HHS is an effort to track whether organs are being fairly assigned.
“There’s always a balance between, in a sense, the equity or the fairness of how the organ gets offered to someone, and … the speed and how efficiently the organ can be accepted by somebody, so that it doesn’t go to waste because it took too long,” Fishbein said.
He said the tool was implemented because the HHS said they were finding organs were being given to patients out of the normal order.
The aim is to crack down on “Allocation Out Of Sequence” events, or AOOS. This often happens when an organ isn’t a fit for patients at the top of the list and it goes out of sequence to whomever can accept it.
“They might have gotten offered to 500 or 1,000 patients, nobody had accepted that organ, and so they would go out of sequence and say, ‘whoever will accept it can have the organ.’ Now, there will be a renewed focus on making sure that it is done in some orderly sequence,” Fishbein said.
At MedStar Georgetown, he said, they have updated their organ transplant operations to presort through their list of patients waiting for transplants.
“And annotate, essentially, the list so that we know which patients have been disadvantaged by the allocation system and for whom we need to keep a special eye out for special offers of organs that might not have been accepted by people higher up on the list,” Fishbein said.
He said that while this change will track how the programs are finding patients for available organs, he’s proud of how MedStar Georgetown and other programs are continuing to ethically allocate organs for transplants.
“We have a very robust, very mature program and system, and in the vast majority of programs across the country, people are working hard and ethically to benefit patients like those on our list,” he said. “Overall, the organ transplant system is good, ethical and these changes that are occurring are relatively minor tweaks in the system.”
WTOP’s Grace Newton contributed to this story.
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