Health Officials Expand Organ Transplant Oversight With New Public Dashboard

Federal health officials have released a new dashboard that tracks when organ transplants take place outside the list of matched patients, saying it will help them crack down on deviations in the transplant process.

When organs are identified for transplant, a computer runs a program that ranks patients using factors such as medical urgency and distance from donors. If the order is not followed, then the situation is labeled an “allocation out of sequence.”

The dashboard will track these events, which will enable officials to “crack down on noncompliance and give patients, families, and clinicians clear information about whether the system is operating fairly,” the Department of Health and Human Services said in an Aug. 27 statement.

“Every patient and family waiting for a transplant deserves a fair, transparent, and accountable process,” said Tom Engels, administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration, the department’s division that helps run the nation’s organ transplant system.

“This dashboard is a concrete step toward that promise. By shining a light on potential out-of-sequence events, we are inviting clinicians, patients, and researchers to help us spot patterns, correct problems, and continuously improve the system. Transparency is how we earn trust, and how we save more lives.”

The dashboard is one step that officials say will help fix the system. Multiple congressional committees are probing the system after health officials uncovered problems, including finding that donations were authorized in some cases for patients who showed signs of life.

Officials said they’ve also launched an avenue for people to file complaints regarding misconduct allegations.

Out-of-sequence allocations have been occurring more frequently over the years. Kidney transplants, for instance, jumped from 2.2 percent in 2020 to 15.7 percent in 2023, researchers said in a paper published in July by JAMA Internal Medicine.

Consequences of the increase include organs going to waste, according to Jesse Schold, professor of transplant surgery at the University of Colorado Department of Surgery and one of the paper’s authors.

Such allocations can violate federal laws and policies, including the National Organ Transplant Act, according to officials.

The transplant system known as the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) is a partnership between federal health officials, organ procurement organizations, and others that is run by the government and the United Network for Organ Sharing.

The OPTN is also forming a workgroup to implement a plan to study allocations out of sequence and educate members on policies concerning the topic.

The United Network for Organ Sharing and the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations did not respond to requests for comment.