The first issue of The Alliance Transplant Quality Corner educational series has been released, providing a comprehensive overview of the new metric for monitoring transplant program performance that will be released by the Scientific Registry for Transplant Recipients (SRTR) in July 2023.
Organ Offer Acceptance Ratios: The New MPSC Metric is a 10-page document that a sub-committee of The Alliance’s National Transplant Leadership Council developed to help transplant centers improve their outcomes. It provides extensive education on the new offer acceptance metrics, tools to understand current performance, a one-page executive summary, and action items for transplant centers to implement.
“We really wanted to focus on organ offer metrics in this first issue because it’s so new and there were a lot of conversations in the transplant community about how people didn’t really know how to tackle it,” says Lindsay Smith, RN, MSN, director of quality for the Vanderbilt Transplant Center, who leads the workgroup. She is chair-elect of the National Transplant Leadership Council and will join Jon Snyder, PhD, MS, director of the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, to present in a Live Advancement Learning Series program on The New MPSC Transplant Performance Metrics: Are You Ready?, which will take place on February 28th at 3pm ET.
Jenna Lawson, MS, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Sarah Taranto, Transplant Analytics Service Line Leader at UNOS, were content contributors/co-authors of the first issue. Additional workgroup contributors include Hellen Odour, Methodist Dallas Medical Center; Melissa Robinson, Loma Linda University Medical Center; Deepa Kurup, UC San Diego Health; and Randall Sung, MD, University of Michigan.
“At the Transplant Council’s meeting last year, we determined that our key priority is to create a forum for timely, complete and clear education about transplant metrics,” says Paul Myoung, MHA, FACHE, Senior Administrative Director of Transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital and The Alliance’s board liaison to the council. “The Transplant Leadership Council has created the ‘Transplant Quality Corner,’ a real-time tool to gain insight into the latest quality metrics, policy changes, and best practices in organ donation and transplantation.”
Future topics under consideration are pre-transplant mortality metrics, 90-day, and one-year conditional graft survival post-transplant metrics, and the UNOS initiative to adjust waiting times for kidney transplant candidates who may have been impacted by the previous race-based calculation of GFR.
“It was inspiring to see the passion for quality and metrics among the members of the workgroup and their determination to highlight actionable items for transplant centers,” says Deanna Fenton, senior manager of educational program development and operations at The Alliance, who served as editor of the project. “Their dedication and expertise were essential to the successful launch of this project.”
“One of the things that was important to the Transplant Leadership Council was that we provide opportunities for feedback,” says Smith. “We included a feedback form on the website that allows readers to provide feedback and submit topic recommendations. We felt it was important to engage with the community, so if people feel that they need more information about a topic, they have the opportunity to tell us and we’ll get to work.”
