More than 8000 patients on the waiting list for kidney transplantation die or become ineligible to receive transplants due to health deterioration. At the same time, more than 4000 recovered kidneys from deceased donors are discarded each year in the United States. This paper develops a simulation-based optimization model that considers several crucial factors for a kidney transplantation to improve kidney utilization. Unlike most proposed models, the presented optimization model incorporates details of the offering process, the deterioration of patient health and kidney quality over time, the correlation between patients' health and acceptance decisions, and the probability of kidney acceptance. We estimate model parameters using data obtained from the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS) and the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR). Using these parameters, we illustrate the power of the simulation-based optimization model using two related applications. The former explores the effects of encouraging patients to pursue multiple-region waitlisting on post-transplant outcomes. Here, a simulation-based optimization model lets the patient select the best regions to be waitlisted in, given their demand-to-supply ratios. The second application focuses on a system-level aspect of transplantation, namely the contribution of information sharing on improving kidney discard rates and social welfare. We investigate the effects of using modern information technology to accelerate finding a matching patient to an available donor organ on waitlist mortality, kidney discard, and transplant rates. We show that modern information technology support currently developed by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is essential and can significantly improve kidney utilization.
Keywords: information sharing; kidney acceptance; kidney allocation; multiple-region listing; simulation model.