NMDP Accelerates Life-Saving Transplant Services With Splunk AppDynamics

Key Challenges

NMDP needs to operate the largest and most diverse bone marrow and blood stem cell transplant registry in the world at peak performance and without service interruptions.

Key Results

With Splunk AppDynamics, NMDP slashed service interruptions by 75%, optimized performance, and minimized downtime of their donor-patient ecosystem that spans donor and patient systems.

Saving lives through cellular therapy, NMDP operates the largest and most diverse bone marrow and blood stem cell transplant registry in the world.

For more than 30 years, NMDP (formerly Be The Match, operated by the National Marrow Donor Program®) 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 blood cancer.

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. Operating a medical registry of this 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 NMDP. “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.”

Across the US, hundreds of transplant centers are dedicated to treating patients diagnosed with blood cancer. Physicians in those facilities are responsible for determining whether a bone marrow transplant is the right course of treatment, and they’re responsible for searching the NMDP registry for potential donor matches, prioritizing location and availability.

Outcomes

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

Improving processes to save time and lives

Time to marrow transplantation is vital to delivering life-saving treatment for critically ill patients, and any interruption or service degradation anywhere in the NMDP 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.

NMDP was eager to reduce technical glitches and take a more proactive approach to optimize the performance and availability of its most critical applications. They 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.

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, NMDP

Eliminating performance obstacles

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 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.

Enabling improvements for donors and patients

According to Moss, AppDynamics has been a transformational force in the way NMDP 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, AppDynamics has helped NMDP 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.”

AppDynamics gives each application team the granular, actionable insights, dashboards, and automated alerts they need to proactively identify and address potential service issues.

Todd Moss Senior Manager of Platform Services, NMDP