More than 80,000 people in the United States are on waiting lists for organ transplants. Some will have to wait for the death of a matching donor, but more and more people are// receiving organs from living donors.

Last year nearly 7,000 people donated a kidney, segment of the liver or lobe of a lung to help someone in need of a transplant. In fact at some major transplant centers — like Barnes-Jewish Hospital and St. Louis Children's Hospital at Washington University Medical Center — the number of transplants involving living organ donors now exceeds the number of transplants using organs from deceased donors.

In an effort to close the gap between organ supply and demand, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine, the University of Michigan and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons are studying ways to reimburse living donors for some of their out-of-pocket expenses when they choose to donate an organ.

"One of the barriers to living organ donation is the financial barrier," says Barry A. Hong, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry at Washington University and one of the study's principal investigators. "When a relative or friend agrees to donate, they might need an airline ticket or have to pay for lodging or medical tests. Much of that is not covered by insurance, so when someone volunteers to be a donor, they may have significant out-of-pocket expenses."

The current study, funded by an $8 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration, will identify and reimburse potential living donors who face financial hardship from those expenses. The investigators hope both to determine whether a system of reimbursement is desirable and by covering some of those out-of-pocket costs to make between 300 and 400 organs available for transplantation that would not have been in the pool otherwise.

"Paying people to donate remains illegal, and that's not what we're doing here," Hong says.
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