The Minister responsible for the Organ and Tissue Authority (OTA), Dr David Gillespie announced $14.9 million funding boost for OrganMatch, a world-class software system that is helping save the lives of more Australians waiting for an organ transplant.
OrganMatch went live in 2019 and continues to improve matching capabilities between kidney donors and people on the waitlist, helping patients who are highly sensitised – and hard to match for medical reasons – as well as young recipients and people who urgently need a transplant.
Since the system began, there have been 31 highly sensitised patients who have received a kidney transplant, who otherwise might not have as easily found a match. One of those recipients had been waiting for a kidney transplant for 17 years, while 12 had been waiting more than five years.
The system has also matched 29 young transplant recipients with high quality donor kidneys, giving them more years of life with their transplant.
OrganMatch provides real time access for clinicians to share time critical information across tissue-typing labs, DonateLife agencies and transplant units. This gives better outcomes for those 1,850 Australians on the waitlist for a life-saving organ transplant.
Donor families also benefit from the OrganMatch system, with reduced timeframes between the time of their loved one’s death and organ retrieval surgery, meaning less time spent waiting in a hospital and more time with family and friends when they most need support.
