Sustainability is a major challenge in multiple areas of the society; within the medicine it is necessary to promote it to develop ways to ensure resource allocation. Cardiovascular disease is one of the main death causes in the world and many resources are allocated to it. Heart transplantation is the only viable strategy for patients with terminal illness. The shortage of donors requires a process to ensure the appropriate selection of receivers. In Brazil there is a single list of candidates by chronological order of arrival and the use of a recipient’s risk scores could dynamically allocate these patients. The objective of this study is to analyze the sustainability of a local heart transplantation program and the necessity for a novel process allocation. The Index for Mortality Prediction After Cardiac Transplantation (IMPACT) score is a risk analysis model validated in other populations with the purpose of defining the risk of death of a transplantation candidate patient in the first year after the procedure. In total, 42 patients were analyzed. In this population, the IMPACT = 6 was associated with a higher mortality risk. The allocation of patients according to their IMPACT score can facilitate the decision making about which candidate is allocated to a transplant and may optimize this scarce resource.
