Finding a Match is Not as Impossible as You Think
How Matching Markets Changed the Way We Coordinate Kidney Transplants
There are over 90,000 patients in need of a kidney transplant, but only 20,000 transplants are performed a year. Due to the shortage, around 5,000 people die per year waiting. If you do the math, that means that ~78% of people are left in the dust and ~5.5% of patients die each year.
From an economic standpoint, end stage kidney disease (ESKD) cost the US $35.4 billion, or 7.2% of the total government budget. And this number is only growing, with projections predicting that by 2030, 16.7% of adults 30 and above will be affected by chronic kidney disease.
While there is huge promise for future technologies that would allow society to grow organs in bioreactors, bioprint organs, or implant artificial kidneys, they are not at the stage necessary to efficiently produce organs at a cost-effective price.
As a result, it’s necessary to find ways to allocate resources and leverage the technologies that we have now to save patients.
In the last five years, there has been a 34.7% increase in deceased donation over the last five years and a 14.2% increase in living donors since 2020.