For the first time, medically relevant information on organ recipients, postmortem and living organ donors is being linked together and stored in one registry. Before the Transplant Registry came into existence, there was no centralised authority in German which retrieved collected data on organ donation and transplantation.
With the amendment of the German transplant law (TPG), which came into force on 1st November, 2016, the Federal Government wants to ensure greater patient safety, transparency and quality in transplantation medicine.
In order quickly develop updated waiting list admission rules and improve the quality of transplantation medical care and follow-up procedures, anonymised data from 2006 – 2016 was collected and submitted to the Transplant Registry.
After an initial set-up phase of three years, the registry went live in 2021 and will include new data from 2017 and following.
Various established organisations and research institutions now have access to a database consisting of more than 3000 variables related to transplantations. The database set includes information from more than 52.000 transplantations in total.
The Transplant Registry operates under the supervision of the contracting authorities of the German transplant law (TPG-Auftraggeber), namely the German Medical Association (Bundesärztekammer), the Federal Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Bundesausschuss) and the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Funds (GKV-Spitzenverband), to ensure that all legal requirements are being implemented.
