Saturday, June 23, 2012

Kidney exchange pilot program: progress report

The official name is the OPTN national kidney paired donation pilot program (KPDPP). The latest news release reports that in March 2012 there were 110 transplant centers enrolled.

However the report also notes that "as of this writing" there are only 129 patients enrolled. That's just about one patient per program. And since 2010 a total of 19 transplants have been performed to date.

I'm hoping that the program will take a look at this participation problem.

Here's a bit of good operational news from a recent announcement:

"Match run frequency increased to twice a month
The goal of the OPTN Kidney Paired Donation Pilot Program (KPDPP) is to increase the number of transplants for candidates who have a willing but incompatible living donor. One way to do this is to increase the number of match runs to more than one a month, which was recently requested by the KPDPP work group and many of the 118 participating transplant centers."

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