Transplant Statistics: 5 Things to Know about the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients

2 days ago | Kristin Eggebraaten | @keggebraaten

Your journey to organ transplantation involves making many important decisions, including selecting the right transplant center for your care. To support you in this important process, we want to share a valuable resource: the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR). SRTR allows you to research and compare transplant centers that perform the type of transplant you need. By providing comprehensive data, SRTR empowers you to make an informed decision, ensuring you feel confident and secure in your choice.

Here are five things to know about using SRTR:

SRTR provides statistical analysis to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), and Department of Health and Human Service. Their reporting aims to evaluate organ allocation and other OPTN policies, as well as assist in policy development, performance metrics, economic analysis and preparation of special reports to Congress. SRTR data is publicly available and accessible to everyone, including you!
SRTR data is released twice a year, in January and July. Program Summary Reports (PSR) are available on every transplant center in the United States. PSRs provide three main sections: program summary, waiting list information and transplant information. You can also view an interactive report online. These reports are a bit less detailed but may be easier to understand as a first look at the data. Don’t be overwhelmed by all the information the SRTR contains. The key is to becoming savvy with what to look for.
The first key is to take notice of the PSR user guide and table of contents, which take up the first few pages of the PDF report. The user guide will orient you to everything the report contains and the table of contents will tell you how to get there.
As you research a specific transplant center, look for their transplant rate. This is a measure of how frequently patients on a program’s waiting list undergo transplant. Programs with higher transplant rates tend to perform transplants more frequently than programs with lower transplant rates. The transplant rate is given as number of transplants per 100 patients listed per year. So a value of 20 means would mean for 100 patients listed for one year at this program, on the average 20 would be transplanted. As an example, we can look at the July 2024 kidney transplant PSR for Mayo Clinic’s campus in Phoenix. On page 5, we see the transplant rate is 76.8 (compared to the expected rate of 31.1), which translates to a median wait time of just over 7 months, an outcome that is among the best in the country.
Two other data points to look at are patient and graft survival. Patient survival is a measure of the likelihood that a patient will be alive at a certain time post-transplant. Graft survival is similar, but reports the likelihood that a patient will be alive with a functioning transplanted organ at a certain time post-transplant. We can look at the July 2024 heart transplant PSR for Mayo Clinic’s campus in Rochester as an example. On page 28, we see that 100% of patients are alive three years after receiving a heart transplant.