Rural-Urban Disparities in Kidney Transplant Evaluation Starts, 2015-2023

A retrospective cohort study of 86,839 adults referred for kidney transplantation between 2015 and 2023, linked to the United States Renal Data System. The dataset, published on figshare under CC-BY-4.0, examines the impact of rurality on the time to initiate transplant evaluation, with results showing a median delay of 166 days for rural patients versus 106 days for urban patients.

Use Cases

• Modeling time-to-event for healthcare access based on rurality and geographic region mentioned in the description
• Analyzing disparities in transplant evaluation initiation based on ZIP-code-defined rurality
• Investigating regional variations in healthcare access gaps, such as those highlighted in New York and the Ohio River Valley

Strengths

• Includes 86,839 patient records from a national registry spanning 2015 to 2023
• Provides specific hazard ratios (aSHR) and confidence intervals quantifying the association between rurality and evaluation start
• Analysis accounts for death as a competing risk and includes multivariable adjustment

Limitations

• Row count for the underlying data is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• The dataset is small (148.1 KB), suggesting it may contain summary or supplementary material rather than raw patient-level data

Provenance

Source

Early Steps to Transplant Access Registry linked to United States Renal Data System (USRDS)

Collection Method

Retrospective cohort study

Time Range

2015-2023

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-06 09:55:24; freshness should be verified

Geography

United States, with sub-analyses by ESRD Network regions including New York, New England, Southeast, and Ohio River Valley