SCIENCE

IBM has announced that the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) has adopted IBM's WebSphere Lombardi Business Process Management (BPM) software to help automate its donor and patient management process. Both processes are critical to facilitate the matching of donors to patients needing cellular transplants.

IBM's software incorporates advanced analytics, social networking and reporting to streamline the record matching process by automatically comparing millions of data records nationwide. These records include donor information, geographic location as well as patient and recipient data.  The objective of the project is to dramatically speed the time to transplant for bone marrow transplant patients, which currently average 96 days.

The NMDP estimates that as many as 10,000 patients may benefit from a transplant each year in the US alone.

"Many of these patients need a transplant quickly to treat their life-threatening disease," said, Jeffrey W. Chell, M.D., chief executive officer of the NMDP.  "We expect our newly combined application suite to significantly reduce the time to transplant. This will help more patients get the transplant they need, when they need it."

"This breakthrough at the NMDP is a prime example of how health analytics can be used to mine data in new ways and streamline processes," said Dan Pelino, general manager, IBM healthcare and life sciences. "New approaches to analyzing patient data are advancing the state of medicine and influencing research. IBM has made a significant investment in analytics over the years and applied this expertise to healthcare with literally life-saving results."

A bone marrow or umbilical cord blood transplant can be used to treat patients with life-threatening blood, immune system or genetic disorders. The NMDP currently facilitates more than 5,000 transplants using unrelated donors or cord blood units each year. The NMDP operates the Be The Match Registry of more than 8 million potential donors and more than 160,000 cord blood units. Through cooperative relationships with international registries, the organization provides access to a total of 14 million potential donors worldwide.

IBM's WebSphere Lombardi software gives organizations the ability to quickly adjust their business processes to support sudden and changing needs—especially those that rely heavily on collaboration to complete a task or project. As a result, the NMDP is able to automate its screening processes, eliminating the need for complicated and time-consuming technical intervention and allowing staff to focus on facilitating the search process more effectively.

IBM is working with partners and clients to create a smarter, more connected healthcare system that delivers better care with fewer mistakes, predicts and prevents diseases and empowers people to make better choices.   IBM supports the nation's leading healthcare providers such as Mayo, Kaiser, UPMC, Duke University Health System and Geisinger Health System with a broad range of technology and business solutions. This work extends from connecting electronic medical records among doctors, hospitals and pharmacies to improving care and reducing cost, to accelerating medical research with deep analytics that discover how well drugs work, to providing genomic advances that will help shape personalized patient care.