PHILADELPHIA, PA –Gift of Life Donor Program, the organ procurement organization (OPO) for eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware, is collaborating with the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) to improve the way organs are transported in the United States.
As a beta test participant for UNOS’ Organ Tracking Service, Gift of Life Donor Program provided crucial feedback and improvement suggestions while using the service to monitor precious organs from donors in the area and ensure they arrive safely to transplant hospitals.
“We are proud to partner with UNOS on this innovative project to protect and deliver the precious gift of life,” said Richard Hasz, Vice President of Clinical Services at Gift of Life Donor Program. “Donor families and patients awaiting transplants entrust our team to be excellent stewards of these gifts. We are committed to continuous improvement and adaptation of technologies to further enable our mission to save lives.”
“We built this service around the needs of the organ procurement organizations who are responsible for transporting organs recovered in their service area,” said UNOS Labs Program Manager Casey Humphries. “The fact that OPOs influenced the work flow of this service is what sets it apart. It was developed and continues to evolve around what works best for them.”
UNOS is now offering the service for all OPOs after more than a year of developing, testing and improving the service based on the direct engagement, influence and feedback from 16 OPOs who participated in a nationwide pilot program. The UNOS Organ Tracking Service utilizes GEGO Internet of Things (IoT) technology and is integrated into the systems that the nation’s 57 OPOS already use to package and label organs for transport and that hospitals use to manage organ offers.
As the mission-driven non-profit organization that works with the organ donation and transplantation community to save lives through transplantation, UNOS is solely focused on making more lifesaving transplants available, safely and equitably, to patients in need. “Providing organ procurement and transplant professionals tools that enable them to work more efficiently and save more lives is at the core of what we do,” said Humphries.
About Gift of Life Donor Program
Gift of Life Donor Program is the non-profit, federally designated organ procurement organization, working with 128 acute care hospitals and 15 transplant centers to serve 11.3 million people in the eastern half of Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware. Thanks to its compassionate community, for the past 13 years, Gift of Life has coordinated the most organ donors in the United States. Its annual donation rate, 55 organ donors-per-million-population, ranks among the highest in the world. Since 1974, Gift of Life has coordinated more than 52,500 life-saving organs for transplant, and approximately 1.75 million tissue transplants have resulted from the generosity of donors and their families. One organ donor can save the lives of up to eight people, and a tissue donor can improve the lives of about 100 others. For more information or to register, visit donors1.org.
About UNOS
United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is the mission-driven non-profit serving as the nation’s transplant system under contract with the federal government. We lead the network of transplant hospitals, organ procurement organizations, and thousands of volunteers who are dedicated to honoring the gifts of life entrusted to us and to making lifesaving transplants possible for patients in need. Working together, we leverage data and advances in science and technology to continuously strengthen the system, increase the number of organs recovered and the number of transplants performed, and ensure patients across the nation have equitable access to transplant.