Every year, over 900,000 people are diagnosed with blood cancer around the world. Stem cell transplants can help to save the lives of these patients by stimulating the production of new and healthy blood cells. However, 70% of the people who need stem cell transplants have no compatible family members and therefore need to find a perfect stem cell match from among the 36 million volunteer donors registered worldwide.
Matchis Foundation is the Dutch center for stem cell donors, providing a life line to cancer sufferers not only in the Netherlands but globally. When one of its registered donors is matched with a patient, it uses a Nintex Automation K2 workflow to help it liaise with the donor, complete all of the necessary checks and assessments and facilitate the life-saving stem cell donation for the patient as soon as possible.
Challenge: Steady increases in donor requests
The Matchis Foundation currently holds the details of over 326,000 potential stem cell donors and expects to grow its register by 30,000-40,000 new volunteers each year. This is great news for the hundreds of thousands of people who need stem cell donations to save their lives, as the expanding register of potential donors means that there is a far greater likelihood that patients will find their perfect stem cell match.
Over recent years, as the Matchis Foundation register has grown in size, the number of potential stem cell donors matched with patients has steadily increased. Indeed, the number of requests for stem cell donations received by the Matchis Foundation is currently growing by around 20% per year, increasing the workload for the team of people who liaise with matched donors and put everything in place for the stem cell donation to take place.
Every time the Matchis Foundation is notified that one of its registered donors has been matched with a patient, it needs to undertake a series of steps, tightly controlled by regulations. These steps cover everything from discussing the donation procedure and risks with the matched donor to setting up medical examinations and hospital appointments. The organization already had very rigorous internal processes for carrying out these steps, but they were time-consuming and included a lot of manual data entry. It therefore wanted to improve the efficiency of this workflow to enable it to handle the growing number of positive stem cell matches.
Solution: A highly efficient, standardized process
Designed and implemented by IT partner Indocs, the new K2 Software solution has significantly improved the efficiency of essential donor services. Nintex Automation K2 automatically generates all the necessary forms for 25-40 matched donors per month, creates checklists of tasks and highlights the most urgent steps that the donor services team needs to complete. Everyone in the team can see the status of donor requests at a glance, share information easily and work more productively to make sure that matched donors can donate their stem cells quickly for patients in life-threatening situations.
The Matchis Foundation anticipates that its use of Nintex Automation K2 will enable it to process more donor requests with its current team. In 2020, it expects to facilitate 250 successful stem cell donations, an increase of 50 over previous years. This will lead to cost savings in the future, as the organization will be able to handle an increasing workload, without additional salary costs.
Nintex Automation K2 has created time savings at many different stages in the administrative process. For example, the Nintex Automation K2 workflow automatically populates six or more forms with donors’ details, which saves up to 75 minutes per matched donor. In addition, Nintex Automation K2 automatically generates email headers with all the relevant reference details, saving the team over an hour in the creation of 15 to 20 emails relating to each matched donor. Considering that the Matchis Foundation currently processes up to 40 donor requests per month, these efficiencies alone add up to a potential time saving of 90 hours or 12 days per month, based on the expected total number of donors.
The new Nintex Automation K2 process gives the Matchis Foundation greater assurance that all administrative steps are completed correctly, without human error, in accordance with Dutch legislation, EU Directives and the global identification, screening and testing regulations for stem cell donations set by the World Marrow Donor Association (WMDA). Nintex Automation K2 also improves collaboration in the team, as everyone can see the same information, work in a standardized way and share documentation more easily.
Indocs is now collaborating with Matchis Foundation and Nintex Automation K2 to deliver additional capabilities for the charity. A new donor case management solution is in development that will further improve the efficiency of the Matchis Foundation in the future.
