Decade-Long Trends in Liver Transplant Waitlist Removal Due to Illness Severity: The Impact of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Policy
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Authors
Dolgin, Natasha H.Movahedi, Babak
Martins, Paulo N.A.
Goldberg, Robert J.
Lapane, Kate L.
Anderson, Frederick A. Jr.
Bozorgzadeh, Adel
UMass Chan Affiliations
Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Clinical and Population Health Research ProgramDepartment of Surgery, Center for Outcomes Research
Department of Quantitative Health Sciences
Department of Surgery, Division of Organ Transplantation
Document Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2016-06-01Keywords
Clinical EpidemiologyEpidemiology
Health Policy
Health Services Administration
Health Services Research
Surgery
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Show full item recordAbstract
BACKGROUND: The central tenet of liver transplant organ allocation is to prioritize the sickest patients first. However, a 2007 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services regulatory policy, Conditions of Participation (COP), which mandates publically reported transplant center performance assessment and outcomes-based auditing, critically altered waitlist management and clinical decision making. We examine the extent to which COP implementation is associated with increased removal of the "sickest" patients from the liver transplant waitlist. STUDY DESIGN: This study included 90,765 adult (aged 18 years and older) deceased donor liver transplant candidates listed at 102 transplant centers from April 2002 through December 2012 (Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients). We quantified the effect of COP implementation on trends in waitlist removal due to illness severity and 1-year post-transplant mortality using interrupted time series segmented Poisson regression analysis. RESULTS: We observed increasing trends in delisting due to illness severity in the setting of comparable demographic and clinical characteristics. Delisting abruptly increased by 16% at the time of COP implementation, and likelihood of being delisted continued to increase by 3% per quarter thereafter, without attenuation (p < 0.001). Results remained consistent after stratifying on key variables (ie, Model for End-Stage Liver Disease and age). The COP did not significantly impact 1-year post-transplant mortality (p = 0.38). CONCLUSIONS: Although the 2007 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services COP policy was a quality initiative designed to improve patient outcomes, in reality, it failed to show beneficial effects in the liver transplant population. Patients who could potentially benefit from transplantation are increasingly being denied this lifesaving procedure while transplant mortality rates remain unaffected. Policy makers and clinicians should strive to balance candidate and recipient needs from a population-benefit perspective when designing performance metrics and during clinical decision making for patients on the waitlist.Source
J Am Coll Surg. 2016 Jun;222(6):1054-65. doi: 10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2016.03.021. Epub 2016 Apr 28. Link to article on publisher's siteDOI
10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2016.03.021Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/28860PubMed ID
27178368Notes
First author Natasha Dolgin is a doctoral student in the Clinical and Population Health Research Program in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) at UMass Medical School.
Related Resources
Link to Article in PubMedae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2016.03.021