The Health Ministry will use mandatory registration of valid personal information for liver transplant patients, officials said.

The ministry will implement the China Liver Transplant Registry (CLTR), a compulsory reporting system, said Vice Health Minister Huang Jiefu while attending a transplant meeting held in Shanghai on Saturday.

"The CLTR system can help doctors track the condition of transplant recipients for the rest of their lives, increase their chances of living and improve their quality of life," Huang said.

Frequent, long-term tests of recipients' health will allow doctors to deal with rejection reactions and other side effects in a timely manner, said Fan Jia, professor and vice director of the transplant center at Fudan University.

According to the ministry, any medical care providers found not to be providing valid information on recipients will be barred from conducting further transplants.

Established in 2005 as voluntary registration system for liver transplant recipients for medical research, the CLTR has collected health information from more than 12,000 liver patients in China.

So far, 61 hospitals that are authorized to conduct liver transplants in China have adopted the system, which produces annual statistics.

According to the latest CLTR statistics, the proportion of transplant recipients who survived more than one year in Shanghai has risen to 79.6 percent, in contrast with 40 percent in the 1990s.

(Xinhua News Agency June 16, 2008)