Research grant to ease financial burden of organ donors12/11/2006, 4:53 p.m. ET
By CHERYL WITTENAUER
The Associated Press
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Washington University School of Medicine is part of a national study aimed at overcoming the financial barriers keeping poor people from becoming living organ donors.
Would-be organ donors sometimes refuse relatives or friends in need because they cannot afford to travel to a transplant center for initial testing or transplantation, study experts say.
A four-year, $8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will pay the transportation, lodging and meal expenses of donors who otherwise couldn't afford to make the trip.
Lead investigator Dr. Akinlolu Ojo of the University of Michigan and colleague Barry Hong, a clinical psychologist at Washington University, emphasized the money is not being used to purchase organs or induce donation.
"It is absolutely illegal to purchase organs," Hong said. "Donors cannot be paid."
Rather, the money will be used to help facilitate donations by people so inclined already. It could enable hundreds to thousands more donors each year, Ojo said.
An individual organ donor could be reimbursed $500 to $3,250 depending on the distance traveled.
Donors will not be reimbursed for lost wages or dependent care, but Ojo said DHHS's Health Resources and Services Administration will consider that, plus a few months of health insurance for uninsured donors, in the future.
"The goal is to put more organs into the pool and help families who might not participate because of the financial burden," Hong said.
He said about 80,000 to 90,000 people need organs in the U.S.; up to 16,000 die every year waiting.
The initiative was driven in 2004 by Congress, which ordered Health and Human Services to award grants reimbursing out-of-pocket expenses for potential donors of limited means.
A previous study by Hong found an estimated 25 percent of living organ donors experience severe financial hardship in the process.
The reimbursement is available to any eligible organ donor in the U.S. Transplant centers will collect some information on applicants but screening and approval will be done by a committee of experts at the American Society of Transplant Surgeons' National Living Donor Assistance Center. Donors will be reimbursed with debit cards.
Ojo said anyone who accepts disbursement and disappears without donating an organ will be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.
The ASTS's Web site says the project scientists will evaluate the program's impact on enabling more people of limited financial means to donate organs. Payments could begin as early as February.
In a related study already under way, Hong and fellow Washington University researchers are among those at six clinical centers taking a close look at the physical and mental health of living organ donors in the months and years following a transplant.
The National Institutes of Health is funding the $12 million five-year study.
The other centers are University of Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic, University of Alabama, University of Southern California and University of Michigan.
"In some sense, transplant centers have never really thought of living donors as our patients," Hong said. "When you don't think of them as patients, you don't follow up with them. Some donors might be followed for a month or six months or even a year, but after that, we really don't know much about them. We just don't know whether being generous and donating an organ might have conferred some extra burden on these people."
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