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It's not always patience and luck that get patients off the organ transplant waiting list and into the operating room.

Unlike in many areas of medicine, experts say there's a lot of variation in the U.S. transplant system. Knowing there are differences and what to ask might help.

"I had to ask a lot of questions to figure out what it was that I could do to move the needle," said Katherine Screws of Phoenix, who got a rare intestine transplant after she decided to get on the waiting list at more than one hospital to increase her chances.

It can be difficult to learn how to navigate that search, but there's publicly available information about which hospitals perform the most of each type of transplant, plus their waiting times and outcomes. Long used by experts analyzing the transplant system, the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, or SRTR, database has new patient-friendly tools developed in the hopes that more would-be transplant recipients will use it.

"People are making these really high-stakes decisions without understanding the options," said Dr. Allyson Hart of Minnesota's Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, who helped design the tools.

S. transplant list at any given time, the vast majority of whom need a kidney. S. last year, more people than ever are getting new organs. It's mostly thanks to over a decade of increases in donations from the deceased, which are recovered by organ procurement organizations, or OPOs.

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