High Rate of Transplantation Prior to Review of Status Exception Requests among Adult Heart Transplant Candidates

In the United States heart allocation system, when transplant centers submit applications for status exceptions to increase waitlist priority, patients obtain the requested status upgrades immediately while their applications are sent to the regional review boards (RRBs) and reviewed retrospectively. How much time elapses between obtaining a status upgrade through exception and application receipt by the RRBs and how often transplants occur during this period is unknown.

Using the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR), we identified all adult heart transplant candidates listed between October 18, 2018 and December 31, 2023 with submitted applications for status exceptions. We assessed 1) the amount of time elapsed between submission of exception applications and their receipt by the RRBs and 2) the rate of heart transplantation during this "travel" time, stratified by whether the applications were eventually approved or denied. Additionally, using complete match run data, we estimated how many listed patients were skipped by candidates who received transplants with exceptions that were ultimately denied.

135 transplant centers submitted status exception requests on behalf of 8,269 adult candidates during the study period, of whom 608 (7.4%) received a denial at least once. The median time from obtaining higher priority statuses immediately via exceptions to application receipt by the RRBs was 3 days. 2,087 out of 8,269 (25.2%) patients received transplants before the RRBs even received their applications, with 115 (18.9%) among 608 with eventual denials and 1,972 (25.7%) among 7,661 with approvals. The cumulative incidence of heart transplantation before application receipt for eventual denials was 19.1% (95% CI [16.0%, 22.3%]) and that for approvals was 26.2% (95% CI [25.2%, 27.1%]) (p < 0.001) at 2 weeks. Based on match run data, the 115 patients who received transplants with denied exceptions bypassed more than seven thousand potential transplant recipients.

More than 25% of patients with status exception requests receive heart transplants before their applications are even received by their respective RRBs, let alone reviewed. This raises significant concerns about the efficacy and fairness of retrospective review of exception requests for the allocation of valuable donor hearts.