The international consulting firm Oliver Wyman has published a report that both identifies and quantifies the significant opportunity for growing the number of life-saving transplants in the United States, especially kidneys. The report takes a deep dive to investigate those components of the system where the most impact can be made and provides an analysis of how changes from current performance in specific areas of the system would result in more transplants.
This report finds that performance gains through a collaborative effort to improve kidney transplant rates could raise the number of deceased donor kidneys transplanted from the current 17,583 in 2020 to 28,310 in 2026, a 61% increase. If such improvement were to be made it would result in a 41,851 additional kidney transplants over those six years compared to if kidney transplants stayed steady at the 2020 level. To realize such an increase, the report finds it will be necessary for the federal government, transplant centers, and organ procurement organizations to work together in aligning incentives to expand the pool of potential and to remove unreasonable disincentives to the use of suitable kidneys from older and more medically complex donors as is done successfully in other parts of the world.
This is a tremendous opportunity to super-charge the growth and availability of kidneys for transplant. I encourage you to take a moment to read the full report here to learn more.