Your New Liver Is Only a Learjet Away: Part 1 of 3

Photo Credit: OrganJet
Photo Credit: OrganJet

The forty million dollar Gulfstream jet landed at Memphis International airport in the early morning hours, its schedule hastily arranged earlier that day from Northern California, where the flight originated. Waiting on the tarmac was Dr. James Eason, head of transplant surgery at Methodist University Hospital, who planned on whisking the passenger to the operating room for a liver transplant. The passenger rushed to Memphis not because he lived in Memphis and happened to be out of town when an organ became available, but rather because he knew that flying from his home in Northern California to Tennessee would give him his best chance of receiving a life-saving organ.
You see, the demand for transplantable livers in Northern California far outstrips the supply, meaning there is a decent chance a patient with end-stage liver disease will die before a replacement organ becomes available. But in Tennessee, the number of people waiting for a liver transplants is significantly smaller, per capita, than California, and as a result the supply of transplanted livers is much better matched to the demand for such organs. As a result of these geographic variations in supply and demand, patients in Northern California wait more than six years, on average, for a liver transplant, whereas the majority of patients in Tennessee receive new livers in less than three months.
That’s right: six years versus three months!
The passenger on the Gulfstream that morning was Apple co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs. After being told he needed a liver transplant, Jobs had learned about the huge disparity in waiting time between California and Tennessee, and arranged to get placed on the transplant waiting list in both locales, knowing he could fly to whichever location came up with the first available organ. So when he got a call from Memphis explaining that a 20 year old man with a compatible blood type had died in a car crash earlier that day, he summoned his flight crew and made his way to Tennessee.
Steve Jobs walked out of the plane that morning a frail shadow of his former self. Pancreatic cancer had spread to his liver and, without a transplant, he had only weeks or months to live. Thanks to that early morning flight and the talents of his surgeon, Jobs received a transplant later that day and would survive two and a half more years, a time in which he introduced the world to the iPad and to a talking phone assistant named Siri.
It was wonderful for Jobs and his loved ones that he was able to receive a transplant that day. But was it fair that Jobs could afford to charter a jet from California to Tennessee to undergo a transplant, while thousands of equally sick Californians waited at home for livers that didn’t always come in time?
Currently, less than 6% of transplant candidates are listed at multiple transplant centers. And less than 2% get listed at transplant centers a long-distance from where they live, like Jobs did. After all, there’s not much reason for Northern Californians to get waitlisted in Tennessee if they cannot afford to rent a Gulfstream on short notice to get them to the transplant center on time. This Gulfstream deficiency may end soon, however, if a start-up company called OrganJet succeeds in its goal of “democratizing Steve Jobs’ transplant experience.” According to the vision of its founder, Sridhar Tayur, OrganJet will make sure that distant transplants are no longer available to only the wealthiest of patients. In fact, if insurance companies agree to pay for OrganJet’s services, as Tayur hopes, virtually everyone with healthcare coverage (be it Medicare or BlueCross/BlueShield) will be able to afford to fly to whatever location gives them the best chance of a life-saving transplant.
Would such democratization be a good idea? The answer to that question is more complicated than it appears at first glance, and raises questions about healthcare equity and regional variation in healthcare quality that are relevant well beyond the world of solid organ transplantation. The OrganJets of the world may finally force us, as a society, to talk more explicitly about just how fair we want our healthcare system to be.
In the US, hearts, kidneys and livers are distributed in a manner that strives to give every patient fair access to these life-saving organs. When a deceased donor’s liver becomes available, the local organ procurement organization (or OPO) offers the liver to the sickest transplant candidate, as long as that person’s blood type is compatible with the donor. Sickest-first is the rule. A rich investment banker with moderate liver disease won’t jump ahead of a bricklayer with severe disease. A white person won’t get priority over an African American, nor a man over a woman, nor a Christian over a Muslim, nor even a Protestant over (God forbid?) an atheist. In short, the liver transplant allocation system in the US is an astonishingly explicit and fair way to dole out life-saving resources.
For all its ethical wonders, however, the liver transplant system is far from perfect. For starters, people without health insurance often have a difficult time accessing the transplant waiting list. Critics quip that the first test physicians order when evaluating patients for transplant is a “wallet biopsy.”
There is another major problem, as Steve Jobs’ experience made so apparent. Barring the kind of wealth that enables people to rent out private jets, a person’s chance of receiving a life-saving transplant depends very much on where that person lives.
Sridhar Tayur first learned about geographic inequities in organ transplantation when he was an invited speaker at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in October 2010. Out for dinner that night with colleagues, Tayur asked one of the Northwestern faculty members what research he did for a living. The professor, Baris Ata, said he was studying fairness in kidney transplant allocation, trying to determine, for example, whether patients who have been waiting longest for their kidney should receive priority over those more likely to benefit from available organs. Such a research topic is not out of the norm for a business school professor to study. Business schools are loaded with faculty who use advanced mathematical models to solve challenging real world problems. Just a few years ago, in fact, Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for developing methods that have helped create kidney exchange programs that match chains of living donors to needy patients.
Tayur realized he had the perfect skill set to solve the problem of geographic inequity in organ transplant allocation, and that his solution would not require any policy changes. He had made an academic reputation for himself figuring out the mathematics of “inventory and supply chain optimization,”—in other words, for helping companies figure out how to allocate scarce resources to maintain the right amount of product on store shelves vs. warehouses. Tayur had even founded and run a software company, SmartOps Corporation, that helped companies make these decisions.
That company had left him, if not Steve-Jobs-wealthy, then at least financially secure: “When you do well in software,” he told me, “you do very well.”
Tayur realized he had an opportunity to give something back to society, as a social entrepreneur: “When I was running my software company,” he told me, “I started using private jets, because I wanted more time with my family while flying out to meet customers at difficult to reach locations. I noticed that there were lots of underutilized private jets lying around the country. I recognized this as a classic optimization problem.” Earlier in his academic career, serendipitously, he had written an academic paper on how to optimize the use of fractional jets, akin to the model used by Share-cars. “I understood private jets, and I understood optimization algorithms, so I knew I could figure out how to get people access to organ transplants, by finding them affordable flights to transplant centers that have shorter waitlists.”
OrganJet was born. (To read the rest of this article, please visit Forbes.)

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