New membership application forms in effect September 1

Published on: Wednesday, July 26, 2017

The federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently approved the most recent versions of all OPTN membership applications. The OPTN, through the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), submits membership applications to OMB for public comment and approval every three years.

The OPTN uses the application documents to collect information to determine if the applicant meets all required criteria for membership under the OPTN bylaws. The newly approved applications contain revisions required under the following three proposals approved by the OPTN/UNOS Board of Directors in 2015 and 2016:

• Updating Primary Kidney Transplant Physician Requirements (passed by the Board in December 2016).  The updates are intended to better align with more recent transplant nephrology fellowship requirements.
• Changes to Transplant Program Key Personnel Procurement Requirements (passed by the Board in December 2015). The updates delete multi-organ procurement requirements for all key personnel, require that all primary transplant physicians must observe three procurements of the organ that corresponds to the transplant program they are applying to be the primary physician of, removes “selection and management of the donor” requirements from the primary liver transplant surgeon pathways, and extends the time period for performing the requisite number of procurements in each primary transplant surgeon training pathway.
• Addressing the Term “Foreign Equivalent” in OPTN/UNOS Bylaws (passed by the Board in December 2015).  The updated requirements remove the ambiguous term “foreign equivalent” from key personnel requirements and clarify qualifications for those who do not have American board certification.

UNOS will implement the new OPTN membership application forms on September 1, 2017. Applicant requests for new membership and member requests for approval of new programs or new key personnel on or after September 1, 2017 must be submitted on the new application forms.

If you have any questions or need copies of a new application form, please contact Christi Manner, Jasmine Smith or Tierra Simpkins by phone at (804) 782-4800 or by email using the format firstname.lastname@unos.org.