July 2019 Program Summary Report Highlights

Jul 29, 2019 | Mayo Clinic Transplant Staff | @mayoclinictransplantstaff

The Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR) is a key resource for transplant patients and their caregivers. SRTR’s mission is to provide advanced statistical analyses on solid organ allocation and transplantation. The organization delivers on that mission by producing three key reports: an annual report, organ procurement organization-specific reports, and transplant program-specific reports (PSRs).

SRTR Pic

PSRs are available on every transplant center in the United States, including all three of Mayo Clinic’s transplant centers located in Jacksonville, FL; Phoenix, AZ; and Rochester, MN. The most recent PSRs released in July feature a number of excellent outcomes at our sites, giving confidence to transplant patients choosing Mayo Clinic.

If you’re unfamiliar with SRTR and the PSRs they produce, we encourage you to dive in. Evaluating outcomes data should be a key step in choosing the transplant center that’s right for you or your loved one. Here are three key definitions and outcomes from Mayo Clinic’s most recent reports.

Patient survival is a measure of the likelihood that a patient will be alive at a certain time post-transplant. The July PSR for Mayo Clinic’s heart transplant program in Arizona reported a three year patient survival of 96.47%, which is statistically better than expected. “Statistically better than expected” means the favorable outcome result is very unlikely to have occurred by chance.

Graft survival reports show the likelihood that a patient will be alive with a functioning transplanted organ at a certain time post-transplant. According to the July PSR for Mayo Clinic’s liver transplant program in Florida, the three year graft survival is 86.76%, which is statistically better than expected. "Statistically better than expected” means the favorable outcome result is very unlikely to have occurred by chance.

Transplant rate is a metric that shows how quickly a program is moving patients through their system once they are listed. Programs with higher transplant rates tend to perform transplants more frequently than programs with lower transplant rates. The July PSR for Mayo Clinic’s kidney transplant program in Minnesota showed a transplant rate of 30.8, which is statistically better than the expected rate of 25.4. It tells us you can expect if 100 patients waited one year. SRTR gets that rate by dividing the “Actual” number of transplants by the “person years”. Time on the wait-list for all patients on a wait-list at a program is converted into “person years” to give a cumulative measure because, various patients are on the wait list for various time-frames. It’s a conventional way to tally cumulative time.

SRTR truly holds a wealth of information that can benefit you on your journey to transplantation. If you’ve used data from SRTR before, please share! What tips and tricks do you know that can help others use this data to make decisions about their transplant care?

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