Browse Transplant Data

Orientation: How to Use This Data

PlainTransplant organizes Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients data into four primary views. The Centers view lists every accredited transplant program in the SRTR cohort, with detail pages showing program-level survival, volume, and waitlist statistics by organ type. The Organs view organizes the same population around the seven transplanted organ types (kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas, intestine, kidney-pancreas), with organ-specific allocation policy summaries and outcome context. The States view groups programs by U.S. state for patients selecting a center within a specific geographic region, and the Compare view supports side-by-side program comparison filtered by organ.

Most patients arriving on this site are referring clinicians evaluating program options for a specific patient, candidates already on a transplant waiting list comparing alternative centers for multi-listing decisions, or family members trying to understand published outcome numbers. Each view is designed to surface the risk-adjusted graft-survival estimate first, with the raw observed survival, expected survival, and case-volume context immediately adjacent. The risk-adjusted number is the right one for cross-program comparison; the raw number without context misleads in either direction depending on a program's referral patient mix.

OPTN allocation policy is national but each organ has different sharing rules. Kidney allocation prioritizes immune compatibility (HLA matching, panel-reactive antibody status) and waiting time. Liver allocation prioritizes medical urgency through the MELD or PELD score, recalculated as a patient's lab values change. Heart allocation operates on a six-status urgency hierarchy. Lung allocation uses the Lung Allocation Score, which weighs both survival on the waiting list and post-transplant outcome. These policy differences shape what waiting-list numbers actually mean: a long kidney list signals access supply mismatch, while a long liver list typically reflects accumulated medical urgency.

Geographic concentration matters in real-world transplant decisions. Higher-density regions (urban Northeast, urban West Coast, Texas, Florida) offer multiple in-network options for most insurers. Rural patients in intermountain West states or the upper Plains may have a single regional referral center and travel hundreds of miles for transplant evaluation and follow-up. The State view surfaces center distribution; the Centers detail pages list each program's geographic catchment context and travel implications relative to typical patients.

Finally, the Compare view is the most reliable place to surface meaningful program-to-program differences. It constrains comparisons to a single organ type, anchors survival numbers to the same SRTR cohort window, and displays confidence intervals so users can see when two programs' adjusted survival numbers overlap statistically. Side-by-side comparison eliminates the most common misreading of program rankings: that small numerical differences in adjusted survival reflect meaningful clinical differences. In practice, programs whose confidence intervals overlap should be treated as statistically indistinguishable on the survival metric alone, and other factors — surgeon experience in your subtype, donor acceptance patterns, post-transplant follow-up logistics, and insurance contracts — should drive the choice between them. Pediatric programs are a special case: outcome cohorts are smaller, donor-recipient size matching is more constraining, and many adult-focused programs do not transplant children at all. Where pediatric volume is reported separately by SRTR, the detail pages note that distinction explicitly.