Dr. Robert M. Merion, MD, FACS has announced that he will step down as President and Chief Executive Officer of Arbor Research Collaborative for Health by August 2021. The Arbor Research Board of Directors has appointed a Search Committee to lead the recruitment efforts for a successor. The position opportunity can be found on the Arbor Research careers page. Following the transition, Dr. Merion will remain on staff as a member of the scientific team.

Our collaborator on the National Living Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC) project, Amit Mathur, MD, transplant surgeon at the Mayo Clinic of Arizona, has been selected to receive the prestigious 2020 Vanguard Award from the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS), in recognition of his recent publication in Clinical Transplantation, “Return on investment for financial assistance for living kidney donors in the United States.”  This work finds that financial support for organ donors’ out-of-pocket expenses produces dramatic federal savings through incremental living donor kidney transplants, by transitioning patients off dialysis. 

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) selected Arbor Research Collaborative for Health as one of 31 organizations across the United States to carry out up to $1.6 billion in contract work related to health care quality measurement over the next decade. CMS designed this contracting vehicle to fund work that promotes improvements in both the quality of care and outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries and in the overall efficiency of the Medicare program.

Dr. Friedrich Port is the 2014 recipient of the National Kidney Foundation’s David M. Hume Memorial Award. To mark this milestone in his career, Dr. Port reflected on the approach of the Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (DOPPS), which he helped to design, launch, and maintain since 1996. Dr. Port’s paper “Practice-Based Versus Patient-Level Outcomes Research in Hemodialysis: The DOPPS (Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study) Experience” was published in the American Journal of Kidney Disease.