Services: Strategy, Enterprise Architecture & Enterprise Solutions
Industry: Government; Healthcare
BUSINESS CASE
Since the beginning of the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) in 1986, more than six million Americans have been added to the national registry of marrow donors. The number of new donors to the registry continues to increase every year, in 2008 the National registry had an increase of approximately 515,000 new donors. The numbers for 2009 have shown an even more dramatic increase with over 400,000 new donors added to the registry in the past six months. A marrow or blood cell transplant is performed to help patients with leukemia, lymphoma, and other life-threatening diseases to live longer and healthier lives. The National Marrow Donor Program donates much of its success to the organizations and centers that help it reach across the nation. One of those organizations is the C.W. Bill Young Department of Defense Marrow Donor Center (DoD), located in Rockville Maryland. This center adds between 50,000 and 100,000 new donors to their registry each year. The DoD has been seeking a way to improve workflow, and migrate from a system and database reaching end-of-life in order to provide a more stable system. This needs to be done while continuously adding donors to the national registry and without crippling their day-to-day processes. The National Marrow Donor Program increases the amount of transplants each year and is expected to double their capacity by 2015, thus increasing the goals and objectives for the C.W. Bill Young Department of Defense Marrow Donor Program.
SOLUTION
Through partnership with the Department of Defense Marrow Donor Center, Data Blueprint provided faster and more automated systems which enabled a more simplified workflow and improved turn-around time between initial donations and full-blown life saving transplants. This solution includes:
- Integrating multiple disparate databases into one
- Reducing errors in file naming, data transfers and updated records
- Enabling decreased turn-around times to connect patients with potential donors in a faster, safer and more reliable manner
TECHNICAL ENVIRONMENT
- Microsoft SQL Server
- .NET
- C#
RESULTS
Data Blueprint’s project and engineering team successfully created and deployed Allelos, a software for lab interface, at the Department of Defense Marrow Donor Program during the 2008-2009 calendar years. Work has been done to engineer the platform to help the donor center integrate their testing and reporting systems into one assimilated interface in order to decrease turn-around time and decrease errors, transfers, and data redundancies. The data engineering experts worked with supervisors from each of the following lab sections; Large Volume and Family Typing, New Allele and Confirmatory Typing, and Sequence Based Typing. Each of the supervisors representing the above groups provided the needs and requirements regarding their business processes and procedures. The Data Blueprint team worked to engineer the Allelos solution to be not only functional, but improve upon the processes for all lab divisions, and accomplished this without creating an entirely new system that would interfere with time and results to the NMDP. Exact metrics on the benefits of Allelos are still being gathered by users and management at the donor center. However, it has been noted that the time to complete lab testing on samples has greatly been reduced due to the efficiency of Allelos and the integrated database of results.
CLIENT TESTIMONIAL
“It is difficult dealing with complex systems and massive amounts of data and Data Blueprint has been very accommodating with our suggestions/requirements. (…) Previously, I had to look in many different databases to get the information that I needed – now all of that information is stored in one database. (…) The Allelos software is able to communicate with other software applications (FUSION and ASSIGN) so the different lab sections can import their results into the same database and we can see each other’s results easily – no more cut/paste or typographical errors from manual entry. (…)”
Carly Massaberg, SSO Large Volume Testing Supervisor