This project will address the low donation/consent rates among African Americans and will be piloted locally through a partnership with Lifeline of Ohio and The Ohio State Medical Center.

Development and implementation of web-based continuing professional education on eye donation process and requesting, in accordance with Section 482.45(3) of 42 CFR, Conditions of Participation, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This education will be approximately one hour long and will include a post-test and evaluation. It will be made available to health care professionals in the Eye Bank service area, including registered and licensed professional nurses, hospital chaplains, and licensed social workers, and will be written to meet approval criteria for applicable professional continuing education credits. The purpose of offering this education is to facilitate compliance with state and federal laws and regulations targeted at decreasing the disparity between the number of eye donation referrals and the actual number of eye donation consents.

Targeted strategies in Southern Ohio to increase support of organ, tissue, and eye donation as measured by registration rates in the Ohio Donor Registry.

Focused initiative seeking to address attitiudes, beliefs, and misconceptions about organ donation, to open the lines of communication regarding organ donation between community residents and health care professionals, to increase the number of organ donor registrants, and increase the consent rate among the African American members of the Greater Cincinnati community.

The purpose of this application is to provide start-up funding to address the imminent problem regarding supply and demand in paired donation. First, we plan to modify the existing paired-donation software, enabling it to optimize the identified matches so as to maximize both the number of transplants that can be performed and the quality of the matches that are performed. Second, we plan to test two different approaches to paired donation using either only 2-way exchanges or a combination of 2-way and 3-way exchanges. We believe that the Second Chance Trust Fund is an appropriate source of funding for these endeavors for two reasons. First, optimization of paired donation will lead to an increase in anatomic donation through living donor kidney donation. Second, the successful completion of these plans will lead to a major publication describing the results, and our acknowledgement of the funding provided by the Second Chance Trust Fund would lead to greater awareness of this Fund not only in the 88 counties of Ohio, but also throughout America and beyond.