NEW YORK – Several city agencies, including the New York City Police Department, have agreed to a compromise that would allow an organ preservation pilot program to get off the ground.

The program would allow for the preservation of kidneys of patients who die outside of hospitals.

With 95 percent of deaths occurring outside of a hospital, it's difficult for emergency workers to save organs for transplantation.

Under the program, the bodies of donors would be raced to the hospital to harvest their kidneys within 25 minutes of their death. Currently only those who die in hospitals are eligible for organ donation.

Law enforcement officials had voiced concerns about the logistics of police being able to rule out whether or not the deceased was a victim of a crime.

"It's a pilot program, at the end of the pilot we'll look at the results, and if it has to be tweaked it'll be tweaked," said Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano. "But we're very excited and we think going forward it's going to save lives, and that's what we're here for that's our business."

A group of local doctors led by Doctor Lewis Goldfrank -- head of emergency medicine at NYU and Bellevue -- has been working on a system of organ preservation vehicles that would keep the organs viable for transplantation.

"We've worked so hard to do something we think everyone must agree about. It's better to save lives and if we have the capacity to do it in an organized fashion we can save more lives," Goldfrank said.

The transport vehicle will look exactly like a regular ambulance, but instead will be identified as an organ preservation vehicle. It will also have everything it needs on board to keep kidneys viable.

"We have to restore the blood flow to the organ as fast as possible. So the goals of the OPV is to maintain that blood flow until we get to the hospital where we can put them on a pump to reestablish that," said Doctor Alexander Gilbert, Transplant Nephrologist at NYU Langone Medical Center.

With the police, city medical examiner and the city's public hospitals all on board, one organ preservation vehicle could roll out by mid-October for a four to six month trial period in the area around NYU Langone and Bellevue hospitals.

All kidneys recovered during the pilot study will go to New Yorkers because the state is recognized as its own region by the United Network for Organ Sharing.

More than 7,000 New Yorkers are currently on the waiting list.

Nationwide, about 100,000 people are in need of new organs, mostly kidneys and livers.