Are Transplant Waitlists Fair Across Multiple Geographies?

April 9, 2023

Fair and efficient organ allocation across multiple geographies can be incredibly complex. It involves coordination between many organizations, hospitals and transplant centers to maintain centralized patient waitlists and perform allocations based on certain guiding principles.

Eight European member countries including Germany, Austria, Croatia, Belgium, Slovenia, Hungary, Netherlands, and Luxembourg have their own national transplant association for donor management. When it comes to allocation and organ sharing, these countries decided to join forces to work for best transplant patient outcomes across the EU. Eurotransplant (ET) is an organization with the mandate to support allocation of organs across the network of 1, 601 donor hospitals and 86 transplant centers across 8 member countries. ET collects data from multiple hospitals across the EU, centrally manages the transplant patient waitlist recorded in its Centralized Database, and allocates donor organs from its headquarters in the Netherlands.

Eurotransplant uses four guiding principles for the fairness and efficiency of allocation:

  1. Expected outcome of transplantation
  2. Expert opinion about the degree of urgency
  3. Potential recipient’s wait time
  4. Member country’s balance of organs shared vs. organs received for transplantation

Allocation principles may vary. In this European scenario, the most efficient allocation depends on the coordination of 86 transplant centers and institutions recording and updating all relevant data about patients waiting for an organ in the database. Centralized allocation also features a strong emphasis on organ sharing between member states.

At Afflo, we streamline the process of entering and updating information in real time through an intuitive and efficient interface to maintain a centralized waitlist. Once a potential recipient is accepted on the waitlist, Afflo’s powerful Workbench Functionality calculates points based on pre-defined, locally customizable and testable transplant policy and business rules that are configurable by authorized users. Point areas that are modeled include factors like patient health, urgency, sensitivity, time elapsed on the waitlist, and other factors. The allocation recommendations generated to match a donor and recipient take into account numerous other factors and exclusions that can be configured in our Matching and Offer Engine. Making centralized allocations across multiple geographies (states, regions, nations) fair and efficient has never been easier.

Ready to learn more?

Afflo has solutions that can accelerate your move to an advanced donor management, waitlist, matching, offer, and transplant program now. Get in touch with us today.
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