UNOS’ effort to give a safe organ transplant on time

From a voicemail to a new mobile app, UNOS is trying its best to give a safe life to Organ recipients. Now the organisation has evolved technologies like xenotransplantation, organ viability platform and drone delivery.

More than one lac people in the United States wait every year for an organ donation.

To solve this problem, a personal network of 57 organ collection organisations (OPOs) has developed a closely linked to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a nonprofit that matches organs donated to potential recipients under an agreement with the federal government. 

It’s a unique aspect of the medical world. From its early beta products to much more professional and advanced technology stacks, the network and its partners have sought to improve the speed and reliability of the organ transplant process. 

Some organisations took great initiative to improve infrastructure, planning and logistics, which resulted in some science fiction initiatives like xenotransplantation, organ viability platform and drone delivery system. 

A man with a cellphone quantity

The president of the organ procurement organisation Gift of Life, Howard Nathan, said that one man, Don Denny, played a large part in the collaborative infrastructure in the early years as organ transplants became more effective in the 1980s.

Denny created its status system for patients from one to four, indicating the need for one of the most urgent organs, which is now opposite in the system.

Nathan described, he would record this message in his voicemail every day, and he heard this recording.

From there, he looked at his donor in the ICU, where he had permission from the family, and if it were a match, he would call.

Nathan says Danny has coordinated 2,700 transplants in 4.5 years, all from his recorded voicemail and phone calls.

After UNOS’s formation in 1977, UNOS finally incorporated it in 1984. By 1986 it had developed a more computerised system to manage the organ matching process using state of the art communication technology faxes.

The vice president of Gift of Life, Rick Hasz, said the technology was not so reliable. We had thermal paper faxes when I started.

If the allocation is delayed, that thermal paper will melt, and we lose the list.

However, with time UNOS has evolved its technology time with the needs of the public and hospitals. Now it relies on a web-based application and Mobile app.

The real benefit of creating the system, though, is being able to collaborate with all OPO affiliates of the organisation and refine the processes based on the feedback of all its users.

Creating Expedia for organs

Calls and Communication are important for transplantation coordination. Organ donation is usually accidental and can happen almost anywhere.

The donor from OPO has only a few hours at a transplant centre from the donor hospital to the recipient patients.

Not only that, they have to define which patients are from the waiting list because there are many transplanted centres interested in a particular organ.

Because they all have ischemic time, within that time, they have to transplant the organs. 

Over the past few years, UNOS has developed a more comprehensive tracking system to understand where organs are located.

The new updates to UNOS’ infrastructure are delivering real-time location information of every organ.

Now UNOS is exploring a ‘Travel app’ it will give some more specific logistics information like travel time, recipient centre etc.

End of the day, for all the changes and new technologies, the basic equation of organs in the United States remains the same.

The biggest thing we need from people is yes donations, and without organ donation, no one gets a transplant.