The National Institutes of Minority Health and Health Disparities has awarded $2.6 million over five years to the Emory Transplant Center and six other transplant centers and organizations in the Southeastern Kidney Transplant Coalition. The funding will continue the RaDIANT (Reducing Disparities in Access to Kidney Transplantation) Community Study in Georgia for another five years and expand it to South Carolina and North Carolina.
Emory Transplant Center epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Patzer, director of the Transplant Health Services and Outcomes Program at Emory, is principal investigator of the grant and Dr. Stephen Pastan, medical director of the Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Program, is chair of the Southeastern Kidney Transplant Coalition and a study co-investigator.
“The grant will go a long way to help us expand some of the work we are doing in Georgia dialysis facilities and include North Carolina and South Carolina, with an emphasis on improving patient access to referral for a transplant evaluation,” says Dr. Patzer. “Our prior work showed that our interventions in the RaDIANT Community Study found that referral for transplantation nearly doubled and racial disparities were reduced. Now we will test whether we find similar effects in a larger, regional population.
Georgia and the Southeast have the highest rates of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) of any state or region in the U.S., but the lowest transplant rates. While the Emory Transplant Center has some of the best kidney transplant patient and graft survival rates of any center in the country, too few ESRD patients, especially those who have already started dialysis, are able to take advantage of these benefits. Research published by Dr. Patzer’s group last fall suggested that low rates of referral for transplantation may be the reason so few ESRD patients receive the benefits of kidney transplants. The Southeastern Kidney Transplant Coalition’s goal is to ensure equity in every step of the transplant process, including referral, medical evaluation, waitlisting, and transplantation.
The Emory Transplant Center is a partner in the Southeastern Kidney Transplant Coalition, an academic- and community-based collaboration that shares the common goal of eliminating health disparities that limit access to kidney transplantation among African American ESRD patients living in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The long-term goal of the coalition is to use community-based participatory research approaches to develop, test and disseminate interventions to improve transplant access.
Learn more about kidney transplant and the Emory Kidney Transplant Program.
