Be The Match
Be The Match accelerates life-saving transplant services with AppDynamics
Key benefits
Improved application, data, and service availability to drive an increase in lives saved
Slashed application downtime by 30% and critical infrastructure interruptions by as much as 75% year over year
Faster root cause identification and collaboration for shorter resolution times with fine-tuned dashboards and alerts that enable immediate resolution, targeted solutions
Be The Match® helps blood cancer patients find life-saving marrow donors with a global network of transplant centers, cooperative registries, and cord blood banks. Be The Match® leverages the actionable insights provided by AppDynamics to reduce time to marrow transplantation and efficiently operate its donor-patient ecosystem 24x7.
“AppDynamics gives each person the tools they need to do their jobs to the best of their abilities and gives everyone else the transparency to hold each other accountable for pulling their weight.”
Todd Moss
Senior Manager of Platform Services, Be The Match
Challenge
Operate the largest and most diverse bone marrow and blood stem cell transplant registry in the world at peak performance and without service interruptions.
Solution
AppDynamics delivers end-to-end visibility that enables Be The Match® to optimize performance and minimize downtime by proactively identifying and addressing potential service issues in real-time – often before an interruption occurs.
Results
Be The Match® is reducing time to marrow transplantation and efficiently operating its donor-patient ecosystem 24x7 using vital insights – spanning both the donor and patient systems – from AppDynamics. The IT teams have slashed service interruptions 75% by eliminating troubleshooting obstacles and pinpointing potential issues before service is affected.
“AppDynamics has been a game changer for us because it gives each application team the granular, actionable insights, dashboards, and automated alerts they need to proactively identify and address potential service issues before they become full-blown service problems that affect other parts of the operation.”
Todd Moss
Senior Manager of Platform Services, Be The Match
Challenge
Deliver 24x7 application availability to support world’s largest bone marrow registry
For more than 30 years, Be The Match®, operated by the National Marrow Donor Program® (NMDP), has been a bedrock of support and hope for the hundreds of thousands of Americans diagnosed with blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma.
Every three minutes, someone is diagnosed with a blood cancer and can happen to anyone, at any time — from 14 month-old leukemia patient to two-time myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) survivor
In response, Be The Match® operates the largest and most diverse bone marrow and blood stem cell transplant registry in the world in support of its mission to save lives through cellular therapy. But operating a registry of that size and importance comes with significant technical and operational challenges.
“Running a global transplant registry isn’t simply a matter of people volunteering to become a donor. There’s a complex orchestra of systems and platforms that support the donors, patients and hospitals, to help identify the closest DNA typing, at the right time, in the right location,” says Todd Moss, Senior Manager of Platform Services at Be the Match. “The role of our digital team is to deliver 24x7 services running at peak performance so our organization can fulfill its promise of saving lives.”
Solution
Improving processes to save time and lives
Across the country there are hundreds of transplant centers dedicated to treating patients diagnosed with blood cancer. Physicians in those facilities responsible for determining whether a bone marrow transplant is the right course of treatment are also responsible for searching the Be The Match® registry for potential donor matches, prioritizing location and availability.
With millions of donors currently on the registry, the organization’s role is to connect physicians, donors, and future survivors efficiently, reliably, and with laser-like precision.
Time to marrow transplantation is vital to delivering life-saving treatment for critically ill patients, and any interruption or service degradation anywhere in the Be The Match® service environment could create delays that jeopardize transplant opportunities. Not only must the registry search and other critical applications work flawlessly, but the donor experience — and all the systems and databases that make it fast and easy for potential donors to register and match with cancer patients — must also be seamless and easy.
Eager to reduce technical glitches and take a more proactive approach to optimize the performance and availability of its most critical applications, Be The Match® adopted AppDynamics to gain real-time performance visibility into various facets of its operation — from the donor registration website and transplant center donor search application to the enterprise service bus middleware that supports it all.
To support the organization’s global mission, Moss’s team wanted real-time visibility and in-depth performance measurements across essential customer-facing applications, core network components, and infrastructure from a single solution to substantially improve the stability and reliability of its donor-patient ecosystem.
Because even a moment of downtime in any part of its operation can impact the survival outcome of any and every patient, the team uses AppDynamics dashboards to monitor and manage critical service level thresholds and empower subject matter experts on each business team to assert ownership over the operation and to prioritize critical applications and services.
“AppDynamics has been a game changer for us because it gives each application team the granular, actionable insights, dashboards, and automated alerts they need to proactively identify and address potential service issues before they become full-blown service problems that affect other parts of the operation,” Moss explains. “Executives, developers and support teams can also use targeted dashboards to gain a broader, end-to-end perspective of the whole environment that we review each month to make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction and alert individual teams of potential issues with Tier 1 applications they may have missed so that nothing slips through the cracks.”
A high-functioning infrastructure is vital to a positive, engaging experience that makes donors like a college cheerleader feel good about their decision to help save a stranger’s life and spread the word to friends and family to participate — especially among less well-represented populations — and grow the donor base.
It’s also essential to executing timely communications and coordinating materials for lifesaving transfusions. Now, Be the Match®-registered physicians can reliably access a list of potential donors, including searching for minority and other harder-to-match participants, knowing they’re seeing the entirety of the available donor set and with total confidence in the available information.
Moss says their monitoring initiatives not only promote greater agility and responsiveness to keeping the platforms running efficiently, but it also fosters a culture of accountability and improved collaboration across the organization. “Everything we do is in service of saving lives, which means that everyone has to be fully on board with what we’re doing and their role in it,” Moss says. “AppDynamics gives each person the tools they need to do their jobs to the best of their abilities and gives everyone else the transparency to hold each other accountable for pulling their weight.”
“Last year we helped save more than 6,000 lives. We are on track to help even more patients find their life-saving donors and provide support through the entire process and the increased performance and reliability we get with AppDynamics will play a big part in that.”
Todd Moss
Senior Manager of Platform Services, Be The Match
Eliminating performance obstacles to save lives
According to Moss, AppDynamics has been a transformational force in the way Be The Match® views and operates its most important IT systems and applications. The real-time, end-to-end service visibility has helped the team reduce service interruptions by nearly 75%, along with a 30% reduction in downtime, year over year, by slashing mean time to discovery (MTTD) and pinpointing exactly where an issue lives, exactly when (or before) it happens.
More importantly, it’s helped Be The Match® eliminate obstacles, enabling improvements in the bone marrow transplant process for donors and patients. “AppDynamics allows us to see how every piece of the puzzle fits together and how each component across both the donor- and patient-facing systems is working,” Moss says. “Last year we helped save more than 6,000 lives. We are on track to help even more patients find their life-saving donors and provide support through the entire process and the increased performance and reliability we get with AppDynamics will play a big part in that.”
About Be The Match
For the thousands of people diagnosed every year with life-threatening blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, a cure exists. Over the past 30 years Be The Match®, operated by the National Marrow Donor Program® (NMDP), has managed the largest and most diverse blood stem cell registry in the world. We work every day to save lives through cellular therapy.
