28 Oct 2011Working Paper Summaries

Fairness, Efficiency, and Flexibility in Organ Allocation for Kidney Transplantation

by Dimitris Bertsimas, Vivek F. Farias and Nikolaos Trichakis
For many people who suffer end-stage renal disease, a kidney transplant is considered a potentially life-saving gift. Allocation policies for kidneys from deceased donors are thus of central importance and have to accomplish major objectives in alleviating human suffering, prolonging life, and providing nondiscriminatory, fair, and equal access to organs for all patients. In this paper, the authors focused on national allocation policies in the United States and the recent effort to revise the current policy. Their design of a national allocation policy focuses on perhaps the simplest, most common and currently used priority method, namely a point system. They also present four case studies in which they designed new policies under different scenarios. Key concepts include:
  • This is a novel method for designing allocation policies based on point systems in a systematic, data-driven way. The method offers flexibility to policymakers to select the fairness constraints desired, as well as the prioritization criteria on which the point system will be based.
  • Critically, this method achieves an 8 percent increase in anticipated extra life-year gains, as demonstrated by numerical simulations, which are based on the statistical and simulation tools currently in use by US policymakers.

Author Abstract

We propose a scalable, data-driven method for designing national policies for the allocation of deceased donor kidneys to patients on a waiting list, in a fair and efficient way. We focus on policies that have the same form as the one currently used in the U.S. In particular, we consider policies that are based on a point system, which ranks patients according to some priority criteria, e.g., waiting time, medical urgency, etc., or a combination thereof. Rather than making specific assumptions about fairness principles or priority criteria, our method offers the designer the flexibility to select his desired criteria and fairness constraints from a broad class of allowable constraints. The method then designs a point system that is based on the selected priority criteria, and approximately maximizes medical efficiency, i.e., life year gains from transplant, while simultaneously enforcing selected fairness constraints. Among the several case studies we present employing our method, one case study designs a point system that has the same form, uses the same criteria and satisfies the same fairness constraints as the point system that was recently proposed by U.S. policymakers. In addition, the point system we design delivers an 8% increase in extra life year gains. We evaluate the performance of all policies under consideration using the same statistical and simulation tools and data as the U.S. policymakers use. Other case studies perform a sensitivity analysis (for instance, demonstrating that the increase in extra life year gains by relaxing certain fairness constraints can be as high as 30%), and also pursue the design of policies targeted specifically at remedying criticisms leveled at the recent point system proposed by U.S. policymakers.

Paper Information

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