Case Study: UNOS achieves faster organ data processing and more transplants with Talend

Making life-saving organ transplants possible each day

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS manages the U.S. organ transplant system, matching deceased donor organs with candidates and maintaining transplant registries. Facing a shortage of donors and slow, hand-coded data pipelines across multiple systems (about 3 TB of data), UNOS needed to make organ offer information available faster so transplant centers could better evaluate and use organs—an urgent issue given that on average people die waiting for transplants.

UNOS deployed Talend Big Data to integrate Microsoft/Oracle databases and web JSON feeds, generate Spark code, and feed three Hadoop clusters with outputs visualized in Tableau. That automation replaced hand-coding, cut processing time from roughly 18 hours to about 3–4 hours, let UNOS go live with the Organ Offer Report in 2.5 months, and enabled centers to review organ biostatistics and outcomes—contributing to more transplants and an estimated 85 lives saved or enhanced each day.

UNOS

Jamie Sutphin

Big Data Services Architect