What is visible is fixable: Visual dashboards for multi-domain assessment of organ procurement organization performance

Abstract

With stakeholder focus on the United States organ procurement system, there is a need for tools that permit comparative assessment of organ procurement providers. We developed a public-facing dashboard for organ procurement organizations (OPOs), using data from multiple sources, to create an online, readily accessible visualization of OPO practice conditions and performance for the period 2010-2020. With this tool, OPOs can be compared on the CMS metric of donors procured per 100 donation-consistent deaths, as well as donation after circulatory death procurement, procurement of older and minority patient populations, procurement in smaller hospitals, and procurement of patients without a significant drug history. Patterns of higher performance were identified, and 74% of differences in overall donor procurement rates could be explained using model variables. Procurement differences were affected to a greater and more reproducible degree by OPO performance among Black and non-White patient populations, as well as in smaller hospitals, than by donation service area characteristics. Dashboards such as ours support OPOs and stakeholders in quality improvement actions, through leveraging benchmarked performance data among organ procurement clinical providers.