Published Dec. 2025
Philadelphia, PA — Gift of Life Institute has launched DonorPedia™, a mobile reference tool built specifically to support organ and tissue donation professionals in real time. Available on smartphones and tablets, the app centralizes practical guidance needed from the moment of referral through organ recovery — eliminating the inefficiencies of searching across binders, shared drives, and disconnected resources. The Institute, an affiliate of Gift of Life Donor Program, is an international training center for organ and tissue donation professionals.
Developed by educators and practitioners with extensive OPO and hospital-based experience, DonorPedia was designed around the realities of frontline work, where timing, clarity, and confidence directly affect outcomes. The app includes more than 50 concise, expert-developed reference guides, featuring:
- Field-tested language for sensitive family conversations
- Best-practice approaches to donor identification and clinical management
- Communication templates to support coordinated interactions with healthcare teams
- Protocols, checklists, and evaluation steps aligned with current standards
“The complex work of coordinating donation demands rapid access to reliable guidance,” said Richard D. Hasz, Jr., MFS, CPTC, president and CEO of Gift of Life Donor Program. “With DonorPedia, OPO professionals no longer need to sift through scattered resources or wait until they’re back at a computer. The information they need is with them at any point in the process — including during critical discussions with donor families or clinical partners.”
Unlike commercial digital tools developed outside the donation community, DonorPedia was built in-house by a mission-driven team with firsthand experience in the work. Its content reflects the questions, challenges, and decision points professionals regularly encounter.
“We saw a persistent gap: the need for trustworthy, accessible guidance at the exact moment it is needed,” said Theresa A. Daly, Vice President of Gift of Life Institute. “Every element of DonorPedia is shaped by what our faculty has lived, learned, and taught alongside the professionals doing this work every day.”
Before launch, the Institute piloted DonorPedia with a wide range of donation professionals with different levels of experience and areas of expertise. Their input informed refinements that ensure the tool supports real workflows, such as:
- Guidance grounded in lived practice, not abstract theory
- Quick decision cues for time-sensitive or emotionally complex situations
- Structured protocols that reinforce consistency across teams
- A searchable, stage-based format built around how donation cases progress in real life
DonorPedia is valuable as more than a reference tool. It’s a means to reinforce training, promote consistency and alignment across teams, and support confident, compassionate decision-making, especially when timing and clarity matter most.
“This is much more than a library of information,” Daly added. “It’s meant to support action — for new donation professionals building their confidence or seasoned professionals navigating the nuances of a challenging case, DonorPedia offers a clear next step when the stakes are high.”
For more information about DonorPedia, contact Theresa A. Daly at tdaly@giftoflifeinstitute.org.
About Gift of Life Institute
Gift of Life Institute has served as an international training center for organ and tissue donation professionals for more than 20 years. The Institute’s comprehensive, interdisciplinary resources designed to increase donation outcomes include skills-based learning, continuing education, collaborative research and consulting services. Since its inception in 2004, the Institute has facilitated more than 650 workshops with all U.S. OPOs and multiple tissue banks, training over 14,000 professionals from across the U.S. and 33 countries around the world.
About Gift of Life Donor Program
Gift of Life Donor Program, founded in 1974 and headquartered in Philadelphia, is the federally designated organ procurement organization (OPO) for the eastern half of Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware serving 11.3 million people. It works with 124 acute care hospitals and 12 transplant centers in its region, as well as more than 100 transplant centers throughout the country, to provide the most comprehensive array of services available in the U.S. to the donation and transplantation community. Thanks to the generosity of its community, Gift of Life has coordinated 14,860 donors and 41,140 organs for transplant, the most of any OPO in the country since the inception of our national donation system in 1988. Overall, Gift of Life has coordinated more than 62,000 organs and more than two million tissue transplants since its founding. One organ donor can save the lives of up to eight people and a tissue donor can improve the lives of 100 others. Learn more and sign up at donors1.org.