UNOS needs to move fast to save over 40,000 lives a year

Every day, an average of 132 organ transplants are performed in the United States. When a donor organ becomes available, a clock starts ticking. There’s limited time to find a match, send an offer, and organize organ recovery, transport, and transplant.

Founded in the 1980s, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) manages most of the organ donation and transplant system in the U.S. under contract with the federal government. UNOS, as part of its contract, is ready at any time—24/7, 365 days a year—to help facilitate lifesaving transplants by managing the national transplant waitlist, balancing shifting priorities, tracking real-time medical data from donors and recipients, and coordinating the transport of organs to their life-saving destination.

“Every transplant represents a life,” says Ralph Medina, Assistant Director, IT Cloud Platform Engineering. “That means every moment counts and we need to find every opportunity to do things faster and more efficiently.”

To support this lifesaving work, Medina turned to the ServiceNow AI Platform, further infusing speed and efficiency into everything UNOS does to serve the organ donor and transplant community. Support teams can track organ placement activity, coordinate organ transport, solve technical problems, and answer questions to reassure a patient’s family in the transplant process—all with the assistance of ServiceNow.

A central platform helps the team coordinate transplants in real time

UNOS’ organ placement specialists provide essential support to organ procurement organizations (OPOs) and transplant hospitals by assisting with the allocation of donated organs. They also coordinate the transportation of organs and tissues for transplantation and serve as a resource to the transplant community regarding organ sharing policies and technical assistance.

When the Organ Center team is notified of an organ placement request, they capture the information needed to create a case in ServiceNow. This includes donor information, surgery locations and schedules, organ transport details, and more. They ensure that everyone involved in the donation and transplant case gets the required information: physicians, transplant coordinators, OPO staff, and the couriers delivering the organ to the transplant hospital.

The documentation of these conversations lives within an encrypted ServiceNow case—serving as a communication log for staff during shift changes where cases go from one organ placement specialist to another. The ServiceNow case also provides secure data management to ensure every organ placement is recorded.

Previously, the Organ Center used static documents to manage data, but these manual processes were challenging to maintain as new and changing information came in, especially in the post-COVID-19 world of remote work. ServiceNow dashboards are used by staff to monitor the number of cases in real time. 

With ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM), the Organ Center team centralizes operational case documentation into a single platform used for managing requests from OPO’s, hospitals, and labs. All team members involved with the case can access crucial information from one place, to easily update information and communicate important milestones in real time. The team works tirelessly to match donors with those on the transplant list. The speed and accuracy gained with CSM has been critical in meeting and exceeding that goal.

“We’re a nonprofit with a cohesive IT team handling nationwide efforts. It was important that ServiceNow offered great out-of-the-box functionality that allowed us to start seeing benefits quickly and easily,” says Medina.

Multiple teams answer questions faster with CSM

As part of its federal contract, UNOS also rolled out CSM to the Service Desk—which handles front-line IT support services—and the Patient Services team—which delivers support and resources to patients, donors, and their families. Case templates proved to be particularly useful for the Service Desk, as they help capture all information upfront, which empowers the team to find a resolution fast. Since starting to work with CSM six years ago, the Organ Center, Service Desk, and Patient Services team have connected with nearly 300,000 people to answer questions, solve problems, and help them be more comfortable with the organ transplant process.

But the biggest change to user experiences came when Medina started using CSM to power a self-service support portal for all organ procurement and transplant medical professionals. Transplant professionals can easily submit requests to UNOS via the ServiceNow platform. UNOS staff communicate with members through the ServiceNow portal when completing tasks. AI-powered search allows users to find answers to common questions, such as resetting a login password or learning about living donations.

With the self-service portal in place, user-facing teams are four times more efficient, as many requests are portal requests rather than phone calls, allowing the team to handle many cases at once. It’s easier to track requests and communicate with those they are supporting. On the user side, they now have a centralized list of tasks completed rather than emails clogging inboxes, messages filling voicemails, or notes created from verbal conversations. 

“Our biggest priority is taking care of people. With ServiceNow, we can reach more people and ensure the services we deliver are of the highest quality,” says Medina.

A core team delivers 24/7 performance with ServiceNow

Medina praises the open communication with ServiceNow for helping UNOS modernize its operations. “We know that we can reach out to ServiceNow at any time to ask for advice about our technological roadmap, understand best practices, and get real-time feedback from their expert architects. They’re the best kind of partner to have,” says Medina.

UNOS, under its contract, requires 24/7 performance to support the needs of the national organ donation and transplant community. With ServiceNow solutions such as IT Operations Management (ITOM), UNOS gains the visibility and AI-powered insights it needs to proactively detect anomalies, predict service outages, and automate root cause analysis, contributing to the efficient management of IT assets, inventory, and facilities with a nimble IT team.

“We know our work can be intense, and we want to give our teams everything they need to make their lives easier,” says Medina. “ServiceNow makes it simple and easy to get work done. People have more time to focus on our mission: saving lives. The ultimate goal would be a world where organ transplants aren’t needed anymore. Until then, ServiceNow helps us help others in need.”