The organ procurement costs of expanding deceased donor organ acceptance criteria: Evidence from a cost function model

Abstract

The shortage of available organs represents a large public health crisis worldwide, including in the United States. 1 One solution is to expand living donation for organs where possible. Another solution is to expand deceased donor organ utilization. The expansion of deceased donor criteria has been an active area of recent research. Comparative studies between the United States and other developed countries including the United Kingdom, Spain, and France have shown that nonstandard donors, including older donors and donation after cardiac death (DCD) donors, are underutilized in the United States, despite evidence showing acceptable transplant outcomes. 2-4 From 2006 through 2018, the use of kidneys from donors age 65 and older remained stagnant below 10%, and discard rates for "lower quality" kidneys (as measured by the Kidney Donor Profile Index [KDPI] >85) remain high at 60%, 5 representing a large

Preemptive Living-Related Kidney Transplantation Is a Cost-Saving Strategy Compared With Post-dialysis Kidney Transplantation in Thailand

“…Therefore, the cost of the DDKT group might be underestimated. Cheng et al (30) reported the estimated organ procurement costs from DDKT using cost function model to demonstrated cost projection. They found that procurement cost of kidney from single-organ transplantation resulted 55,000 USD per kidney.…”

The Medical Costs of Determining Eligibility and Waiting for a Kidney Transplantation

“…We previously used this approach to estimate the costs of dialysis and hospital services for Medicare beneficiaries 9,10 and the costs of procuring organs at an organ procurement organization level. 11 Figure 1 illustrates the cost function framework as applied to the pretransplant setting. 12 which enabled us to create, at the transplant hospital level, proxy measures for transplant hospital processes (eg, number of waitlist additions at each hospital each year) and case-mix indicators (eg, percent of incident waitlist patients with diabetes mellitus).…”

Trends in Cost Attributable to Kidney Transplantation Evaluation and Waiting List Management in the United States, 2012-2017

“…It is therefore impossible to directly deduce what each transplantation-specific service costs. Part of our future direction is to apply a cost function approach, as has been applied to dialysis modalities 22 and organ procurement costs, 23 to estimate the costs of each transplant-specific service.…”