The Role of Registries in Kidney Transplantation Across International Boundaries

Abstract

Transplant professionals strive to improve domestic kidney transplantation rates safely, cost efficiently, and ethically, but to increase rates further may wish to allow their recipients and donors to traverse international boundaries. Travel for transplantation presents significant challenges to the practice of transplantation medicine and donor medicine, but can be enhanced if sustainable international registries develop to include low- and low-middle income countries. Robust data collection and sharing across registries, linking pretransplant information to post-transplant information, linking donor to recipient information, increasing living donor transplant activity through paired exchange, and ongoing reporting of results to permit flexibility and adaptability to changing clinical environments, will all serve to enhance kidney transplantation across international boundaries.

Keywords: Donor medicine; global health; health information system; low-middle income countries; paired exchange.