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Iowa BMT Program Achieves Rare Ranking

For the third year in a row, the University of Iowa’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center (HCCC) Adult and Pediatric Blood & Marrow Transplant Program has been rated an “outperfomer” by the Center for International Blood & Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) in their annual review and ranking of 179 national BMT programs performing allotransplants. (Center performance on autologous transplants was not considered.) Fewer than 10 percent of US centers achieved this goal in 2016, and only about 6 percent of centers have maintained this ranking for 3 years running. Iowa’s BMT program joins 16 other centers nationwide to have earned this prestigious status in CIBMTR’s 2016 rankings.

The CIBMTR ranking report is a critical measure that can help patients, families, and referring providers identify the best transplant centers to treat blood cancers like leukemia, myelodysplastic syndromes, myelofibrosis, myeloma, and lymphoma. This report compares the predicted and actual survival rates of patients across a rolling three-year period, adjusting for the varied severity of cases seen in order to more accurately compare programs. The predicted survival rate of the 145 patients treated at Iowa, according to the report, was 63.0 percent but the actual survival rate was 73.8 percent, a dramatic outperformance. Iowa’s BMT center is one of only a few “outperforming” programs in the Midwest in 2016, which speaks to the unique skill and dedication of the entire team in the university’s HCCC.

CIBMTR has published these rankings yearly since 1994 and with this methodology since 2005. They will make this report publicly available at bethematch.org and at a US Department of Health and Human Services website.