Hortonworks and United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the organisation managing organ transplants in the US, are collaborating to help transplant professionals make insight-driven decisions when life-saving organs become available.
UNOS has been a data-centric organisation from its inception. The organisation maintains data on every organ transplant performed in the United States since 1987, a substantial sum considering the nearly 31,000 transplanted organs in 2015 alone. As a non-profit, UNOS maintains this database under a tight budget. As UNOS sought to build an enterprise data warehouse and merge disparate and large data sources with unstructured and variable formats, they tapped Hortonworks’ Data Platform.
“We felt that Hortonworks offered more flexibility to leverage open source versus finding ourselves in a position with other providers that might lock us in. We didn’t want to lock ourselves into a proprietary solution,” said Alex Tulchinsky, chief technology officer, UNOS.
One of UNOS’ first HDP use cases aimed to improve the quality, scope and timeliness of its Organ Offer Report for transplant centers and organ procurement organizations. Through a self-service reporting system and Hadoop-based data analytics, new reports are more detailed, visually rich, and are generated more quickly. UNOS has since expanded its use of HDP and is planning bold new projects in the future.
“We want to be able to correlate diverse sets of data to create a unified view of all historical data about patients and organs before, during, and after transplantation. This will give the donation and transplantation community more information into factors considered for organ transplants, which in turn will influence future transplantation policies and practices,” said Tulchinsky.
“Leveraging data to gain insights into clinical, financial and operational improvement is paramount and Hortonworks Data Platform provides the scale and flexibility to put all data under management, in order to facilitate actionable intelligence,” said Richard Proctor, general manager of healthcare, Hortonworks. “We are proud to partner with UNOS to increase organ transplant efficiency and ultimately save more lives.”
Read more about UNOS and Hortonworks’ Big Data journey
