A site that matches people for organ donations, not datesCanton nonprofit links those who need organ transplants with potential donors
Posted Feb 04, 2009 @ 01:02 PM
CANTON —
In 2004, Paul Dooley went to his doctor, Jeremiah Lowney, with an idea. Dooley’s father had been sick and in need of a kidney transplant, but the man’s doctor had told him the situation was hopeless – he would die before he reached the top of the organ transplant waiting list.
Dooley had started an Internet job board called CollegeJobBoard.com, and wondered if the same concept could be applied to organ donations. If a Web site could match employers and job seekers, then it could also match people in need of organ transplants with potential donors.
Together, he and Lowney created MatchingDonors.com, a site where patients can post profiles with their stories and potential donors can seek potential recipients. From there, donor and patient must contact a transplant center that arranges for testing to determine if they are a match.
Since the site launched in 2004, 92 transplants have taken place as a result of matches made on it. There are currently 5,574 potential donors listed on the site and 387 people seeking organs. Live organ donors most commonly donate one of their kidneys, but they can also donate portions of their liver, lungs or pancreas.
The site charges $595 for a lifetime membership to post a patient profile. The Canton-based organization is a nonprofit, and Lowney said that all fees are used for travel and hotel expenses for donors. Ultimately, he said he would like to reimburse donors for wages lost during the time they must take off work. Dooley said that neither he nor Lowney takes a salary, and there is one full-time paid employee in their office.
Lowney, who is 42 and lives in Milton, practices internal medicine with his father in Hyde Park.
MatchingDonors.com has been featured by several national news outlets and has been the subject of controversy because of the ethical issues surrounding organ donation.
Do you see any negative consequences of patients meeting organ donors online?
I think it’s great, as long as both parties know what they’re doing and as long as all the information is out there. We’re the infancy stage of a transplant. We’re a critically important part of it, but we’re the infancy stage, we’re at the beginning. People meet and then the process is taken over by the transplant center. And that’s really important, because it’s not just anybody meeting online to go somewhere and get a transplant.
There’s a whole process – rules, regulations – that the transplant center has in place that people have to follow. ... And if a transplant center decides that this transplant isn’t something they are willing to do for whatever reason – other than they don’t like the way they met – then we don’t have any problem with that. It’s totally up to the transplant center. There are still some hospitals that won’t take patients that meet online. But Mass. General, Beth Israel Deaconess, the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins – all of them are with us and understand that what we’re doing is actually very helpful and a good thing.
Do you worry that the organs are not necessarily going to the sickest people?
I don’t worry about that, because everyone that comes off the list, regardless of whether they’re the sickest – and you know, you can’t even find out who’s on the top of the list if you wanted to. It’s so random, and it changes so often, that you don’t even know who’s on the top of the list in this country.
Every time you take somebody off that list, other people are moving up. It doesn’t matter where they fall. If that was the case, if we would say, well you know, the sickest person isn’t getting the kidney, then what do you say about a brother that donates to his sister? Is the sister the sickest person on the list? That brother, if they’re willing to donate, they should donate to the sickest person on the list? We’re not going to make people do that. If you want to donate to your sister, you’re going to donate to your sister.
Are there problems with people trying to get money for their organs?
For the most part, 99 percent of the people don’t get involved in that. And the other thing about that is, if I had five people that contacted me, and four of them said, “I really want to help you, I think that maybe I can be a donor” and then out of the five people, one of them said, “I want to help you, but I want $10,000.” What are you going to do as a patient? I’ve got four people, why am I even going to deal with that guy? And that’s the good thing about it, is there’s so many people that offer to help.
Julie Onufrak may be reached at jonufrak@ledger.com.
http://www.dailynewstribune.com/state/x1452244273/A-site-that-matches-people-for-organ-donations-not-dates
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