The Carlos and Marguerite Mason Trust has awarded the Emory Transplant Center a $500,000 grant over two years that will go towards increasing access to the benefits of living donor kidney transplants among Georgians.

The grant will help Emory Transplant Center researchers design, implement and evaluate new recruitment and retention tools in partnership with Tonic Health, a leading medical data collection system. The initiative's goals are to help living donor candidates navigate the donation process and to be able to easily track them through the entire transplant process.

"Due to enhanced awareness in the community, an increase in accessibility and various educational initiatives there are more end-stage renal disease [ESRD] patients in Georgia coming forward as potential candidates for transplantation," says Thomas Pearson, MD, DPhil, executive director of the Emory Transplant Center. "Both the number of available deceased donor organs and living donor kidneys for ESRD patients have plateaued in the last three or four years, making the need to explore new techniques to increase the donor pool more urgent than ever."

The Emory Transplant Center has started a pilot project to capture patient questionnaires and intake notes electronically to help speed the evaluation process. The new system will flag patients who could be appropriate candidates for kidney donation based on criteria developed by researchers and will help reduce the time nurse coordinators need to review records. It will be more patient friendly and efficient than current phone call screening processes. The new technology will be one of the most innovative electronic screening systems for facilitating living donor kidney transplantation available anywhere in the country.

With the help of the Mason Trust grant, the Emory Transplant Center hopes to increase the number of kidney transplant evaluations by at least 30 percent, and decrease the time from referral to donation by 20 percent.

"We are truly grateful for the dedication of the Carlos and Marguerite Mason Trust to help ESRD patients and their families learn about the benefits of transplantation, assist them in the transplant process, help them find living donor matches, and enable our faculty and staff to monitor their progress," says Dr. Pearson.