Data reported to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) is used in kidney transplant research, quality metrics and in policy development, but the accuracy of post-transplant outcomes measures is unknown. In this study, we compared post-transplant outcomes such as, delayed graft function (DGF, defined as dialysis in the first week of transplantation), post-transplant serum creatinine and acute rejection reported to OPTN to data collected for the Deceased Donor Study – a prospective cohort study at 5 kidney transplant centers. From 2012 to 2014, research coordinators (not involved in administrative operations related to OPTN) manually abstracted outcomes data from charts of 555 deceased donor kidney transplant recipients. Using Deceased Donor Study as the gold standard, we found that the sensitivity and specificity for DGF in OPTN data was 89% and 98% respectively. Serum creatinine values at 6-months in DDS and OPTN had high concordance (Lin's correlation 0.91). In contrast, for acute rejection by six months, the OPTN data recorded rejection in only 22/43 instances (49% sensitivity; 99.5% specificity). In conclusion, these results suggest that contemporary OPTN outcomes data for deceased donor kidney transplant recipients have high validity for DGF and 6-month serum creatinine, but rejection rates are under-reported.

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