Dartmouth Health clinicians have begun piloting a telehealth-enabled model to make kidney donation more accessible to rural residents.
The pilot is funded by a $375,000 prize from the Kidney Innovation Accelerator, or KidneyX, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the American Society of Nephrology.
The Dartmouth Health transplant team received the prize as one of nine winners of the 2026 KidneyX EMPOWER: Living Link Prize Challenge, a $4 million national competition. Dr. Abraham Matar, a transplant surgeon at Dartmouth Health, led a proposal called “A Rural Living Donor Tele-Navigation Hub to Reduce Barriers and Increase Living Kidney Donation.” HHS announced the winners Aug. 27.
Matar told the Valley News that he and the team sought to reduce the burden living kidney donors experience when traveling long distances to complete in-person appointments.
Matar said living donors must have at least two pre-operative checkups and four to six post-operative checkups. But some donors live as far as two to three hours from Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, and traveling to appointments can be particularly hard during winter and when the donor needs someone with them.
Matar said the pilot uses telehealth to “bring the process to the patient, rather than having the patient adapt their life to the transplant center.”
In the pilot, donors have access to telehealth appointments that would previously have been in person. Matar said the transplant team has reduced the number of post-operative in-person visits by half for the two donors already enrolled in the pilot.
The transplant team will hire a rural donor navigator to provide education and organize medical testing near donors’ homes. Dartmouth Health had already partnered with clinics to conduct necessary blood tests and X-rays near donors. Now, the team will try to partner with clinics to conduct more complex tests, such as CT scans, Matar said.
The pilot also facilitates peer mentorship from prior rural donors. Those mentors might share guidance and personal experience with informing employers, arranging childcare and talking to family, Matar said.
Matar estimated that the transplant team performs around 10 to 15 kidney transplants from living donors a year. Last year, surgeons performed 27 kidney transplants in all, he said, and the rest were from deceased donors.
Lauren Ludwig, a registered nurse and living donor coordinator at Dartmouth Health, said kidneys from living donors usually work faster and function longer than kidneys from deceased donors. And when someone in need of a kidney finds a living donor, that person receives the transplant quicker. Those on a waiting list wait far longer, which can cause complications even if they receive a kidney, she said.
“People get sicker as they’re on dialysis, and so they have a harder time with the recovery after transplant,” Ludwig said.
Nationally, more than 95,000 people are on the kidney waiting list, and about 12 Americans on the list die each day, according to July 2026 data from the Health Resources and Services Administration. Fewer than 7,000 living donors provide kidneys annually, and that figure has stayed roughly flat over the past two decades, according to HHS.
Matar said he couldn’t say for certain why the number of living kidney donors has stagnated. But he said he thinks the request to pause one’s life for three to four months and navigate the difficult healthcare system deters some potential donors.
“That entire process can just become burdensome,” he said.
The pilot will enroll about 10 to 15 donors. After 18 months, the team will survey donors and analyze the data on the reduction of in-person visits, cost savings and other results, he said.
Matar said the team plans to present findings at national meetings with the hope that transplant teams around the country could implement or learn from the pilot. He said a scaled-up model could increase living kidney donation not just around Dartmouth Hitchcock, but across the United States.
Matar and Ludwig encouraged people to learn more about kidney donation at dartmouth-hitchcock.org/transplantation.
