Center-Level Utilization of Kidney Paired Donation

With many multicenter consortia and a United Network for Organ Sharing program, participation in kidney paired donation (KPD) has become mainstream in the United States and should be feasible for any center that performs live donor kidney transplantation (LDKT). Lack of participation in KPD may significantly disadvantage patients with incompatible donors. To explore utilization of this modality, we analyzed adjusted center-specific KPD rates based on casemix of adult LDKT-eligible patients at 207 centers between 2006 and 2011 using SRTR data. From 2006 to 2008, KPD transplants became more evenly distributed across centers, but from 2008 to 2011 the distribution remained unchanged (Gini coefficient = 0.91 for 2006, 0.76 for 2008 and 0.77 for 2011), showing an unfortunate stall in dissemination. At the 10% of centers with the highest KPD rates, 9.938.5% of LDKTs occurred through KPD during 20092011; if all centers adopted KPD at rates observed in the very high-KPD centers, the number of KPD transplants per year would increase by a factor of 3.2 (from 494 to 1593). Broader implementation of KPD across a wide number of centers is crucial to properly serve transplant candidates with healthy but incompatible live donors.