Intended audience: recipient coordinator transplant program admin

Recipients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) who are waitlisted for a liver or liver-cluster, meet the HCC exception criteria, are 18 years of age or older, and who have a medical status of SMC, must have current HCC data to accrue wait time and be included in organ allocations.

If the recipient’s HCC data are expired, the system automatically applies a HCC suspension to their waitlisted transplant journey (and all clustered journeys).

A transplant journey that is on HCC suspension:

  • Does not accrue wait time.

  • Does not accumulate exception points.

  • Is excluded from organ allocations.

HCC suspension triggers

The system places a waitlisted liver or liver-cluster journey on HCC suspension under the following conditions (all must be true):

  • The recipient has HCC and HCC Within Criteria is selected under Liver Specific Details in their profile.

  • The recipient’s medical status is SMC.

  • The recipient is 18 or older.

  • The Date of HCC Data is more than 120 days old.

    • The system first alerts the transplant program when the Date of HCC Data is 70 days old.

Lifting a HCC suspension

A HCC suspension is lifted when new HCC data are entered.

A waitlisted transplant journey may have multiple holds and suspensions applied to it at the same time. Lifting a HCC suspension does not have any effect on other holds or suspensions.

Determining whether a transplant journey has a HCC suspension

The system indicates which journeys are on HCC suspension in a variety of ways.

HCC suspension notifications

When a HCC suspension is applied, the system sends a notification to the recipient’s transplant program.

Identifying HCC suspensions in a recipient profile summary

  1. Go to the recipient’s profile.

  2. The summary section at the top of the profile page presents an overview of all transplant journeys along with their status.


Identifying HCC suspensions in the waitlist history table

  1. Go to the recipient’s profile, then select Liver > Waitlist on the sidebar.

    • A table at the top of this section presents historical medical statuses and waitlist status changes.

  2. HCC suspensions are indicated by Suspended: Liver HCC in the table’s Type column.

    • If the End Date is blank, the journey is still on HCC suspension.

    • The Days column indicates how long the journey has been on HCC suspension.

    • The Details column indicates HCC Expiry.

Filtering the waitlist summary for suspensions

Create a waitlist summary that filters for suspensions. This includes medical suspension, heart suspension, HCC suspension, and NaMELD suspension.

  1. Select Waitlist from the main menu at the top of the page.

  2. Specify search criteria in the fields at the top of the page.

    1. Ensure that Include Suspended Recipients is selected.

  3. Select the Generate Report button.

    1. The Results Summary indicates the total number of Suspended Recipients that matched the search criteria.

  4. In the Waitlist Summary list, sort or filter by the Suspended column.

    • If the Suspended column is not visible, select the Columns button to control which columns are displayed.


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