CIBMTR Infection and Immune Reconstitution Working Committee Outlines Challenges and Progress
FACT and the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) collaborate in a variety of ways to use the power of data to improve patient care within individual transplant programs and the field as a whole. The FACT-CIBMTR Data Audit Committee evaluates corrective action plans (CAPs) for data management in the context of CIBMTR data audit results. The FACT Clinical Outcomes Improvement Committee evaluates CAPs for clinical outcomes, including when risk-adjusted one-year survival does not meet the expected range of the CIBMTR Transplant Center-Specific Survival Report.
Infection data are an important part of both of these efforts. Cause of death is a critical field within CIBMTR’s on-site data audits. Infection is one of the most commonly reported causes of death reported to FACT in clinical outcome CAPs.1 This data is a complex field to report but could hold the key to many ideas to improve patient survival following transplantation.
Fortunately, there is a committee for that. According to the website, cibmtr.org, “The CIBMTR Infection and Immune Reconstitution Working Committee provides scientific oversight for studies about prevention and treatment of post-transplant infections and issues related to recovery of immune function.”
This working committee recently published an update of its challenges and progress in the CIBMTR newsletter. This update provides statistics about infection-related deaths and issues that make the collection of infection data complicated and demanding. The CIBMTR committee also extended its appreciation to data managers for providing the committee with the high-quality data it needs to do its important work. (Please send their thanks to your data management team!) Finally, the committee closed its article with a list of manuscripts that may help your program improve patient survival. We encourage you to take advantage of the knowledge gleaned from the work of this expert committee of physicians and statisticians, made possible by the data you all submit.
1LeMaistre, C.F., Wacker, K.K., Akard, L.P., Al-Homsi, A.S., Gastineau, D.A., Godder, K., Lill, M., Warkentin, P.I. (2019). Integration of Publicly Reported Center Outcomes into Standards and Accreditation: The FACT Model. Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, 25, 2243-2250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbmt.2019.06.035
