Integration of Publicly Reported Center Outcomes into Standards and Accreditation: The FACT Model.

The rapid evolution of blood and marrow transplantation (BMT), coupled with diverse outcomes associated with heterogeneous groups of patients, led to the formation of 2 important organizations early in the development of the field: the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) and the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy (FACT). These organizations have addressed 2 of the 9 elements identified by the National Quality Strategy (NQS) for achieving better health care, more affordable care, and healthy people and communities: a registry that promotes improvement of care and accreditation based on quality standards. More recently, a federally mandated database in the United States addresses the third element of the NQS: public reporting of treatment results.

Preparing for growth: current capacity and challenges in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation programs.

During the past decade, the demand for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation has grown dramatically, and there are expectations that this will continue or even accelerate over the next decade. This prompts a variety of questions about the ability of the health care system to accommodate the increased demands on transplantation centers; for example, what is the current patient capacity of transplantation programs, and how much elasticity do they have to accept a larger volume of patients? An informal survey of a sample of medical directors of transplantation programs found that existing facilities might be able to increase their patient volume by about 7%. Expanding much beyond that limit will require an infusion of resources to enlarge current programs and/or establish new programs.

Preparing for the unthinkable: emergency preparedness for the hematopoietic cell transplant program.

Emergencies come at the most inopportune times. Some are totally unexpected, others come with short warnings. Although rare, an emergency comes with the potential to wreak disaster and pose serious risk to the services provided to hematopoietic cell transplant (HCT) patients.