The Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR), under contract from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), is charged with evaluating the performance of the nation’s solid organ transplant system through publication of semi-annual transplant program-specific reports (PSRs) and organ procurement organization (OPO)-specific reports (OSRs). These reports contain performance metrics covering various time periods. For OPOs, these metrics include eligible death conversion rates and deceased donor organ yield. For transplant programs, they include waitlist mortality rates, transplant rates, organ offer acceptance rates, patient mortality after listing, and 1-month, 1-year, and 3-year posttransplant outcomes, including graft and patient survival.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, SRTR modified the evaluation metrics for transplant programs and OPOs for the January 2021 and July 2021 reporting cycles, as previously announced. Potential modifications for the January 2022 reporting cycle were considered at the Analytic Methods Subcommittee of the SRTR Review Committee (SRC) at its meeting on March 24, 2021, and the full SRC meeting on April 27, 2021.
Both the Analytic Methods Subcommittee and the full SRC recommended an ongoing carve out of the first quarter of the pandemic (March 13, 2020 through June 12, 2020) from adjusted performance metrics, as detailed below. These recommendations were reviewed by HRSA’s Division of Transplantation, which oversees SRTR. HRSA approved these recommendations, which SRTR will implement for the January 2022 reporting cycle. These changes will remain in force beyond the January 2022 reporting cycle, unless otherwise amended:
These decisions will apply to the evaluations released in the SRTR’s semi-annual PSRs and OSRs scheduled for release in January 2022.
As with the January 2021 and July 2021 reports, SRTR will continue to report descriptive data beyond March 12, 2020 (eg waitlist counts, transplant counts, recipient characteristics, donor counts, donor characteristics) but will alter data for performance evaluation metrics, as described above.