Case Study: United Network for Organ Sharing achieves fairer, continuous lung allocation and reduced waitlists with Decision Lens

Providing Lifesaving Organ Transplants to Our Nation

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is the nonprofit that operates the nation’s Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, coordinating professionals and volunteers to make lifesaving transplants possible. UNOS faced a challenge with its categorical organ-allocation rules—dozens of hard classifications (e.g., a strict distance cutoff) produced unfair edge cases—so the Lung Transplantation Committee sought a fairer, continuous distribution approach that assigns points to multiple attributes and required broad community input to rank and weight those factors.

UNOS partnered with Decision Lens to run Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) sessions that gathered feedback from hundreds of professionals, patients, and advocates; nearly 200 participants used the platform to rank attributes. Stakeholders praised the tool’s ease of use and flexibility, and modeling showed the continuous-allocation scenarios substantially reduced the waitlist compared with current rules. The lung model is targeted for implementation in 2022, with plans to apply the approach to other organs to achieve more equitable transplants and save more lives.

United Network for Organ Sharing

James Alcorn

Senior Policy Strategist