The government is dithering on coming up with an online transplant registry that could help bring about more transparency in organ donation, transplantation, and the outcomes.
While the transplant of organs through deceased donor donation has come down drastically this year over the preceding years because of the High Court’s intervention on making brain death declaration more transparent, the government is sitting over a proposal by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) that would create a real-time online registry of all organ donations and recipients.
NIC plan
The NIC’s proposal to develop the software for ₹8.7 lakh is yet to find approval, adding to the government's ‘go slow’ attitude in this regard.
The proposal is for maintaining records of patients on the waiting list for various organs on a web portal that would have an interface for the public and back-end office application. The portal will show information and the services of the Kerala Network for Organ Sharing.
The application would manage the registration for both donor and recipients, organ allotment, patient score and prepare a priority list of patients according to the updates by each transplant centre.
The public would be able to apply for services such as registration and would be able to download various forms and proceedings through the web portal.
According to the proposal, apart from services such as registration and waiting list, the portal will also give real-time alerts.
Proposed system
The proposed system is expected to cover all activities of organ transplantation such as registering organ transplant centres, non-transplant-organ-harvesting centres, filing brain death certificates and also integration with the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation portal among others.
It also gives a detailed account of how all these activities would be conducted, such as, how the recipient can be registered, the recipient’s medical record giving details of whether transplant was done, whether alive or lost to follow-up. Full-fledged medical details regarding the recipient’s condition for organ requirement has to be given to generate a score considering all the medical data.
The donor registration also needs to carry details of the medical data such as the condition of organs to be donated besides the consent of family and the team of doctors’ recommendation. All these details entered into the system will automatically generate an intimation through SMS or e-mail to the donor and the centre concerned whether the registration is approved or rejected.
An information system would be available for the public to get the details of any transplant centre and other reports on allocation, waiting list, availability or organs and so on.
