Organ and tissue transplant is a medical marvel. But it's also something of a logistical miracle.
The process of pairing a patient with a matching organ involves multiple hospitals and even more physicians, sometimes located thousands of miles away from each other, communicating in real time, with clinical precision of the utmost importance and speed of the essence. Add to that the necessity of family consent and of stringent state and federal regulations.
The complex process worked reasonably well over the past half-century or so using handwriting, fax machines and telephones. But there was plenty of room for improvement, says John Piano, president and CEO of Transplant Connect, a Santa Monica-based developer of communications systems that work to optimize organ procurement and transplant.
"I became aware of some significant gaps in the organ, tissue and eye transplant field, in terms of processes and big-picture flow of information," says Piano, an entrepreneur who, along with other technology execs and with input from organ procurement organizations (OPOs), founded Transplant Connect in 2003.
"Organ transplant is such a mission-critical field that requires so many different agencies to interact in real time. The more we learned about the field, it became clear that there was a cost-effective and extremely viable electronic medical record solution."
Transplant Connect's Web-based software links OPOs with hospitals, transplant centers and tissue banks to maximize donation and transplantation while improving coordination and communication between agencies and eliminating paper-intensive logging of donor information.
The system interfaces through the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which is set up by the government and is run by the Department of Health and Human Services, to manage and allocate the wait list for organs, says Piano. "They then make the initial offer to transplant center hospitals that then come back to our system for more data and more detailed information."
Transplant Connect now services "one out of every two organ transplants in the U.S.," says Piano, and "probably 25-30 percent" of tissue and cornea transplants.
Compared to the old way of doing things, "it's night and day," says P.J. Geraghty, director of Organ Recovery Services at the Donor Network of Arizona in Phoenix. "In addition to the transplant center staff, as a manager I can go online at any given moment and see the status of a patient. I don't have to call up the staff at the hospital and ask them questions, I can go online and get most of my questions answered."
Transplant Connect, he says, "has been a great advantage to us, and I think to the industry as a whole. For many years we've relied really on paper records and word of mouth. I would be evaluating an organ, and I would write down the information, and then I would call the various docs and would communicate that verbally. With that, there's always the possibility of poor communication or misinterpretation or missing some information that may be critical. By making all that information electronic, it really reduces the error and allows the transplant staff to have a much better picture of the donor and make a much better and more reliable evaluation."
