CMS digital modernization makes organ transplants more accessible, efficient, and cost-effective

End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) is among the costliest chronic diseases facing Americans today. Care for people living with ESRD costs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) nearly $50 billion each year, with dialysis costs per patient reaching an estimated $80,000 per year. While studies have shown that kidney transplantation is a less costly long-term treatment versus dialysis, acquiring a new kidney is easier said than done for the 92,000 Americans who currently sit on the transplant waiting list.

To bring innovation and efficiencies to the national organ procurement process, CMS partnered with ICF to modernize its End-Stage Renal Disease Quality Reporting System (EQRS). This digital transformation has helped CMS better control its kidney disease-related costs while helping tens of thousands of Americans suffering from this chronic disease live fuller, healthier lives.

EQRS supports CMS in collecting a wealth of ESRD data, including quality measures for dialysis and kidney transplants and Medicare claims and eligibility information. But CMS needed the system to work faster and more efficiently, making health IT data more accessible and actionable for a variety of healthcare providers and social workers.

By modernizing the legacy EQRS system to expedite data intake and deliver more robust data analytics, CMS could help kidney care organizations place patients on the kidney transplant list earlier and easily monitor their status. Such a modernization could benefit both patients (keeping them active on the list and improving their care) and CMS (lowering overall costs related to ESRD care in the long run).

Leveraging AWS cloud infrastructure, ICF built a modernized architecture for EQRS that synthesizes large amounts of data. This allows distributed care teams to more quickly connect with one another and get the data needed to expedite the kidney transplant process. Thanks to a consolidated dashboard, healthcare providers and social workers don’t have to comb through multiple systems to get a patient’s waitlist status and related kidney health information when time is of the essence.

Working in an Agile environment, our engineers built the modernized EQRS alongside CMS subject-matter experts, human-centered design specialists, and end-user groups. By defining requirements and developing prototypes quickly, we worked with maximum efficiency, achieving the best solution in the shortest timeframe possible.

Since its launch in 2020, 225 organ transplant centers and more than 7,000 dialysis facilities have had full access to the modernized EQRS. This system gives them immediate, comprehensive visibility into their patients’ dialysis treatment information and their transplant data. By integrating data sources through a consolidated dashboard, the modernized EQRS frees stakeholders from inquiring across waitlists, transplant centers, and dialysis facilities to keep their patients healthy and on the waitlist.

For CMS and the federal government, faster organ procurement and transplantation can mean millions in annual savings. But for Americans languishing on that long transplant list, staying active on the waitlist can be the difference between life and death.

Partnerships like this are raising the bar for federal health IT transformations that drive efficiencies, provide value, and deliver better health outcomes for Americans suffering from chronic diseases.