Introduction: With the increasing number of organs available for transplant and with improvements to allocations schemes, the number of organ offers made by NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) has increased in the last 5 years (approximately 40,000 per year). Additionally, the complexity of donors and the information collated to assess suitability of donor’s organ has increased significantly. This has resulted in a dependency on email and paper-based process, leading to prolonged offering and overall donation process.
NHSBT recognised the need for a new transformative solution to simplify and speed up the process of assessing suitability of organs, organ allocation and sharing donor information among the transplant community to improve organ allocation, utilisation and reduce risk.
Method: Surveys were sent to all internal and external stakeholders and thirty workshops hosted across the UK, to interrogate end to end process, experiences, and challenges.
A prototype was developed to facilitate follow up demonstration workshops and collate feedback to ensure the final product was designed and developed with users at the forefront.
Results: NHSBT developed a new, tailored web-based application “TransplantPath” which met the unique and complex needs of the Transplant community providing:

• A single source of data for all donor information, reducing risk to patients.
• A cyber secure and reliable application, which can be used on and renders to any device.
• A user friendly, intuitive application making locating key information and updates effortless.
• Standardised and accessible real time donor data and media including organ images and videos.
• Safe, structured, and improved end to end communication.
• Efficiency through quicker decision making by simplifying the process.
• Simplified infrastructure to allow for future iterations to support improvements and future transformation.

Conclusion: Although in the early stages of launch, NSHBT has already began to realise the benefits of TransplantPath.  With a reduction in frequency and length of calls, workload related to organ allocation and less transcription.  Within its first two weeks seeing more than 550 quality organ images and videos images being shared safely, with a projection of 10,000 images a year.
Transplant Path is estimated to bring a 30% reduction in clinical incidents and save 61 days per year in manual processes, with an average time saving of 29.5 minutes for every one of the 40,000 offers made a year. Resulting in quicker informed decisions, better organ utilisation rates and outcomes.