Jakarta's Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital (RSCM), through its Eye Bank unit, has introduced a single-window registration system for people who need a cornea transplant and for those willing to donate the tissue after death, detikHealth reports. The system is connected directly to SATUSEHAT, the national health platform run by Indonesia's Ministry of Health. According to detikHealth, the setup is intended to make the process transparent, orderly and fair for both recipients and donors.
Why it matters
Cornea demand in Indonesia outpaces the supply of donated tissue, and the Eye Bank's approach shows how the queue is actually managed. Rather than handing out tissue on a first-come, first-served basis, RSCM ranks patients by how urgently they need surgery, a detail that matters for anyone waiting for a graft. The digital link to SATUSEHAT also signals a push to bring organ and tissue services into the country's wider health records system.
How patients get on the waiting list
For a patient who needs a cornea transplant, the process starts with registration at a health facility under the one-stop system. detikHealth reports that patient data is held centrally and the waiting list is reviewed at regular intervals.
Placement on that list is not decided by registration order. Instead, the medical team assesses each case on clinical grounds, looking at how severe the damage is in the affected eye and whether the other eye can still see.
Dr Rina La Distia Nora, head of the RSCM Eye Bank, explained the logic to reporters at the launch of RSCM CAREs in Jakarta on Wednesday, 28 October 2026, according to detikHealth. She said the team first checks whether the patient's other eye is functional, then weighs how serious the condition of the worse eye has become. The more severe the case, the higher the patient moves up the priority scale. The aim, she said, is for patients in the most critical condition to be treated sooner.
What donors need to know before signing up
People who want to donate their corneas can now register their intent through an application, detikHealth reports, citing data from the Eye Bank's information system, which is integrated with SATUSEHAT. At present, the feature only records a person's intention to donate.
Cornea donation is voluntary: a person states during their lifetime that they are willing to give the tissue after they die. No special eye examination, such as a test for nearsightedness or astigmatism, is required at the point of registration.
Because the tissue is retrieved after the donor has died, the process depends on firm commitment and on the family's formal consent, which is obtained through counselling with a grief counsellor at the hospital. Detailed health screening, including blood tests to rule out viral infections or malignant disease, is carried out only after the donor's death and before the cornea is passed to a recipient.
Dr Rina described the sequence to detikHealth: once a donor dies, the team schedules the cornea retrieval, then runs blood tests to check for infection. She said all of this is set out in the informed consent documentation.
What to watch
The hope behind the integrated digital system, detikHealth reports, is that more members of the public will sign up as voluntary cornea donors, shortening the long waiting list and moving Indonesia toward self-sufficiency in eye care. Whether registrations rise under the new system is the number to watch.
