The exponential growth of data provides a wealth of information that, if managed and analyzed effectively, can result in innovations and discoveries that affect our world. Nowhere is this truer than in the health care field, where the right data analysis can lead to new findings that profoundly change lives in an instant. The key to unlocking this data is technology. Without it, many of today’s life-saving medical advances would not be possible. In short, technology saves lives.
For Be The Match®, which operates the world’s largest listing of potential marrow donors and donated cord blood units, data is life. Thousands of patients with life-threatening diseases like leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle cell disease need a marrow transplant every year but don’t have a match in their family. Operated by the nonprofit National Marrow Donor Program®, Be The Match helps connect these patients with donors. The organization understood that to save more lives, it needed a technology foundation that would act as an enabler, not a constraint. That’s why Be The Match is built on NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP).
“The ability to make faster decisions and to analyze information in real time has a direct impact on the lives of our patients, making our storage platform a critical piece to our success,” said Michael Jones, chief information officer of Be The Match. “With NetApp, we have been able to greatly accelerate the flow of data, which has enabled us to facilitate 50% more transplants around the world. NetApp has been instrumental in helping us save more lives.”
By giving patients access to a registry of more than 15 million donors and 400,000 umbilical cord blood units, Be The Match helps facilitate thousands of potentially life-saving transplants every year. Transplant doctors search its Be The Match Registry® using a sophisticated matching algorithm application that is 100 million times more complex than blood typing programs. Since 2007, the number of transplants facilitated per year has risen steadily, from 3,700 to 5,500. Be The Match has set a goal to facilitate 10,000 by 2015. This aggressive growth, coupled with the sheer complexity and volume of data, triggered the organization to transform its existing IT infrastructure with NetApp® storage at its core. By building on NetApp, Be The Match was able to turn its IT environment into a catalyst for life-saving speed and flexibility.
NetApp Helps Be The Match Push the Envelope of What Is Possible
As a result of its overall transformation program, Be The Match realized a number of benefits that allowed it to speed the process of discovery, extend its global reach, and create more accurate matches, directly helping the organization save more lives.
Highlights include:
A newly integrated application suite, which includes consolidating Be The Match data onto a NetApp platform, has allowed the organization to reduce the time to transplant by 15%. Because many patients have diseases that can progress very quickly, the window of opportunity to identify a donor and perform a transplant can be as small as months or even weeks. Cutting the time to transplant helps patients move more quickly through the transplant process and improves their chance of survival.
Be The Match has doubled its annual donor registrations by building a new donor recruitment portal as a result of its shared IT infrastructure on NetApp. The new portal helped increase annual donor registrations, from an average of 360,000 per year from 2000 to 2008 to about 850,000 for the last two years. The more potential donors Be The Match has access to, the higher the likelihood that a patient will find a match.
NetApp is able to deliver the performance and bandwidth that Be The Match requires to rapidly complete complex analytics and to run 10 times more concurrent matching algorithm searches than on its legacy storage. The result helps improve matching accuracy and boost survival rates.
NetApp’s leading efficiency capabilities have enabled Be The Match to reduce capacity requirements by 900TB and dramatically simplify overall management, allowing it to scale from 65TB to 350TB without adding any new resources. The efficiency gains also enable the organization to lower overall storage costs, which is of paramount importance for a nonprofit organization.
Moving to a NetApp foundation has enabled Be The Match to improve information visibility and sharing across applications and user groups, which is critical for its partner network of 525 affiliated organizations in 40 countries. Because nearly half of all transplants involve an international donor or recipient, Be The Match will make its services available to its affiliates via a private cloud built on NetApp.
To find out how you can sign up and experience the power of saving a life, visit
www.BeTheMatch.org.
Supporting Quotes
Jeffrey W. Chell, M.D., chief executive officer of Be The Match
“Technology is critical to Be The Match’s success. NetApp has removed the technology barriers and enabled us to forge ahead with our ambitious transplant goals. We are confident that with NetApp at the core of our IT infrastructure, Be The Match will be able to continue to push the envelope of what is possible with cellular therapy and help save more lives around the world.”
Rob Salmon, executive vice president of Field Operations, NetApp
“The work that Be The Match does is incredible and has touched so many lives around the world. For Be The Match, data is the most precious resource, and their IT transformation has revolutionized the way they work and the research they can conduct. To have NetApp serve as the foundation for the new infrastructure is proof that the right technology can truly help save lives.”
Additional Resources
Learn more about how business success is built on NetApp:
www.netapp.com/BuiltOnWatch how Be The Match saves lives built on NetApp:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTVaRsN4eg8Connect with NetApp experts and storage enthusiasts on the NetApp Community:
http://communities.netapp.com/community/products_and_solutions/efficient_itFollow NetApp on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/NetApp Join NetApp on Facebook:
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