LAUSR

T he paper by Blackstone et al. (1) in this issue of the Journal provides an insightful exploration into predictors of mortality on the heart transplant waitlist at a single institution. The unique and prescient aspect is the “dynamic” analytic display that follows a patient through his or her experience on the waitlist, continuously updating the predicted mortality based on adverse events and resampling of various laboratory indicators of subsystem function. Each recalculation generates a new solution to the hazard function equation, which translates the cumulative hazard into a mortality risk calculation. Theoretically, this method could provide a new paradigm for allocating organs based on a continuous risk model.