Personalized organ donation directives: saving lives with PODDs

Excerpt

Despite various strategies that aim at persuading relatives to permit donation, the family veto of donation still constitutes a significant impediment to respecting potential donors’ wishes to have their deaths benefit others [1]. Personalised organ donation directives (PODDs) offer a potential solution to the problem of the family veto. PODDs would be cloud-based digital documents with video content that can be emailed to friends and family, and which also prompt the user to reconfirm organ intentions every year. Those who receive your PODD via email will receive a statement of your organ donation intent in text form with a digital signature, and a link that can be clicked in the event of your death, which will take them to the most recent version of your PODD (assuming that you do not want to send them yearly updates). PODDs also enable video messages to be recorded for families and friends, which will greatly increase the chances that organ donation intentions will be respected. While the main PODD text document is the same for all contacts, videos can be personalised for different groups so that families can be asked to respect donation wishes and friends asked to ensure that families do so. The video component is optional but this element is key to making the PODD an effective persuasive tool. Box 1 illustrates the 10-minute process of setting up a PODD. …