L. Ebony Boulware, MD, MPH, dean of Wake Forest University School of Medicine and chief science officer and vice chief academic officer of Advocate Health, was recently featured in a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Viewpoint that examined racial inequities in clinical care and health outcomes.
Boulware, alongside two other authors, focused on redressing the harms of race-based kidney function estimation and examined the recent decision of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) to require transplant centers to modify kidney transplant wait times for Black patients who might have been adversely affected by the race-based approach to the estimation of glomerular filtration rate, a blood test that checks how well the kidneys are working.
The viewpoint also discusses how the Kidney Donor Profile Index is not currently fit to guide kidney allocation because it devalues organ donation by Black donors based on a weak association between donor race and kidney transplant failure.
JAMA, published continuously since 1883, is an international, peer-reviewed general medical journal. JAMA is a member of the JAMA Network, a consortium of peer-reviewed general medical and specialty publications and is the most widely circulated general medical journal in the world.
The OPTN is a unique public-private partnership that links all professionals involved in the U.S. organ donation and transplantation system. A driving force of the OPTN is to improve the U.S. system so that more life-saving organs are available for transplant.