Rob McTier, UNOS Business Architect, shares what’s in store for his TMF session about the upcoming offer filters pilot
Did you know UNOS is developing an offer filters model? And the pilot is about to start?
Some transplant programs field many thousands of offers in a year, but might accept only a few hundred. UNOS is about to launch the first phase of an innovative tool that could help change how offers are filtered and ultimately increase utilization.
UNOS Business Architect Rob McTier says the offer filters tool will allow transplant hospitals to filter out donor offers they do NOT want to receive by selecting unlimited multiple criteria. “You don’t have to worry about there being overlap between any filters—if it meets one of your filters or all of your filters, you won’t get any offers for the organ.” Reducing unwanted organ offers reduces cold ischemic time and promotes increased utilization overall.
TMF attendees will be able to learn more about the pilot phase when McTier and UNOS Principal Research scientist John Rosendale present on the project. Direct and regular outreach with transplant programs was crucial—by sharing modeling data with the centers they identified as potentially benefitting from filters, UNOS attracted 29 programs into the pilot phase.
Staring in May, participants in this first phase will have a month to set their filters before data collection begins—once that occurs, procurement coordinators won’t see anything different, but behind the scenes UNOS IT will be applying the offer filters. In the fall, the data will be compiled and returned to the centers.
McTier says talking with UNOS researchers about filters became a really effective way for a transplant program to understand its offer acceptance practice in general. “We want programs to understand what their practice is and to refine it—so organs are directed to centers that will take them, faster.”
The potential for offer filters to transform transplantation is why the UNOS team won The Great Idea Pitch Challenge at The Alliance’s 2018 National Critical Issues Forum. At the forum, Rob McTier and other lead UNOS researchers and contributors were recognized for how their approach toward utilizing data and improving systems could increase organ utilization.
