Mid-America Transplant receives UNIVANTS of Healthcare Excellence distinction for donor serology screening innovation
Mid-America Transplant announced that it has been recognized as one of three winners of distinction by the UNIVANTS of Healthcare Excellence program. The award is based on the organization’s improved real-time donor serology screening process, which has enhanced resource utilization, reduced waste and expedited lifesaving transplants.
The UNIVANTS award recognizes one such improvement, in which Mid-America Transplant leveraged the Abbott Alinity s lab equipment, typically used in blood banking, to automate tissue and organ donor screening for communicable diseases, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV). The FDA-approved test system enables real-time screening for hepatitis, HIV and HTLV.
Following implementation of the automated donor serology testing platform, the lab now produces tissue screening results in one hour, instead of the 18-hour turnaround time for manual results. This enables technicians to proceed only with those donor cases that are eligible, leading to a 94.7% improvement in workflow efficiency as well as more viable tissue procured. The new lab process also reduced overall pre-allocation testing for organs from 7.1 to 4.6 hours and created opportunities for additional organs to be transplanted in cases where time previously would have been a limiting factor.
Additionally, the availability of infectious disease status prior to tissue recovery has reduced clinician exposure to infectious diseases by 89.9%. Over the 18-month period post-implementation, Mid-America Transplant also has saved 742.5 hours of unnecessary operating room time and employee hours, since previously coordinators often had to procure tissue before infectious disease testing results were available, then learn that the tissue was not transplantable when the tests came back.
In 2022, Mid-America Transplant enabled 772 lifesaving organ transplants. The organization also provided 165,000 tissues for transplant in 2022.
