Engaging the third estate: the Transplant Growth and Management Collaborative

The Organ Donation and Transplantation Collaboratives that occurred within the United States from 2004 to 2008 helped contribute to a significant increase in organ donors and transplants across the country. Centers were needed to accommodate and maintain this increase in capacity to perform successful transplantations for candidates on the waiting list. The Transplant Growth and Management Collaborative was created to help fulfill this new performance level expectation. In 2007 the US Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration published a best-practice report based on high-performing centers that experienced a significant increase in volume while maintaining expected, or higher than expected, outcomes. The report produced a change package that outlined common strategies, key change concepts, and actions used at the best-practice centers that could be adapted by other transplant programs by using Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles to test the impact of the changes. This change package and use of the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles formed the foundation of the Collaborative that occurred from October 2007 through October 2008 to spread best practices to transplant programs willing to commit to making changes that could result in a 20% increase in transplant volume. More than 120 transplant centers participated at some point in the Collaborative. Although preliminary results of the Collaborative show that only a few participating programs achieved the 20% volume increase goal, many participating centers reported putting successful models in place for each of the strategies identified in the best-practice change package.