UNOS routinely receives questions from member institutions about data that is required. UNOS collected common questions received and provided answers below.

Question: How do you define an admission? Does admitting a recipient (or living donor) for observation count? Or do they need to be an inpatient or have a stay longer than 24 hours?

We define an admission as any admission that is reimbursable under current CMS regulation.

Question: How do I report transplant dates for a multi-organ transplant procedure?

When you remove a waiting list registration, the transplant date you report should be the first anastomosis date of the organ(s) associated with that registration. For example, if you remove a kidney/pancreas registration from the waiting list, you can only report one transplant date (anastomosis date of whichever organ was first anastomosed). If  your recipient receives a kidney and a liver, you should report  the kidney transplant date as the anastomosis date of the kidney, and report the liver transplant date as the anastomosis date of the liver.  

Question: Do I report a patient's death on the TRR form if he or she died soon after the transplant date?

Yes, you should report the death of any patient that dies before they are discharged on the TRR. 

Question: When do I create an Interim Event death form?

If there is already an expected form for the patient, complete and validate the form with the death information. Once you validate the form, it will become an RD - Recipient Death form. Unless there is a lost form or other form that needs to be removed, you do not need to open a Service Portal request to notify us of the patient's death. If there is no expected form and you need to report a patient's death in Tiedi, you would use the Report Interim Event link from the patient history page.

Question: I need to complete my TRF form and have no data to submit. I am trying to decide if I should report the recipient as "Lost to Follow-up" or "Not Seen." Is one option better than the other?

You may submit a request through the UNOS Service Portal to make the patient status "not seen" on a TRF. Reporting the patient as "not seen" for this year allows next year's follow up-form to generate on schedule, in case data become available then. If you report your patient as "lost-to-follow up," no future follow-up forms will be generated.

Example: If the transplant was performed on January 1, 2010 and you have no follow-up data to report on the six year follow-up form, you may submit a request to report the patient status as "not seen." We will use the anniversary date of the form (January 1, 2016) as the patient status date.

Note: Data Quality no longer requires you to report a patient status as "lost to follow up" if you have reported "not seen" on three consecutive TRFs. You may now report "not seen" for more than three consecutive TRFs to accurately reflect your interaction with the recipient.

Question: Status Fields exist for some data elements and enable you to indicate a value of "Missing" or "Unknown" or "Not done" in lieu of entering an actual value. What is the definition of Missing, Unknown, and Not done?

Missing - you do not have the data and cannot get it
Unknown - you do not know if the data exist, and there is no way for you to verify that it does or does not exist. An example of when this might be used would be if the historian for a patient was not aware of a particular element of a patient's social history and there was no way to get that information.

Not done - you did not perform the test. For a specific example, on the thoracic TRR we collect hemodynamics before the transplant. If you did not perform any invasive hemodynamic measurements at any point before the transplant (even during the evaluation phase), then you could select 'Not done.'