This is one in a series of stories told by NetApp customers that demonstrate how an organization’s storage architecture has a direct impact on its success. This is the story of Be The Match® and how its NetApp based shared IT infrastructure is helping save more lives than ever before.

White Paper—Be The Match Transforming IT to Save LivesThe story of how Be The Match is leveraging technology to give critically ill patients a chance at life

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Executive SummaryThousands of patients with life‑threatening diseases such as leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle cell disease need a marrow transplant but don’t have a match in their family. More than 70% of patients depend on Be The Match to find a match. To call its data “mission critical” would be an understatement. Operated by the nonprofit National Marrow Donor Program® (NMDP), Be The Match helps connect these patients with donors. By providing patients access to a registry of more than 15 million donors and 400,000 umbilical cord blood units, Be The Match facilitates thousands of potentially lifesaving transplants every year.

Data is at the core of the registry and the transplant process. The more efficiently it flows, the faster critical decisions can be made and the greater the chance that patients can be saved. This is what inspired Be The Match Chief Information Officer Michael Jones, newly hired in 2007, to set a bold goal for the organiza‑tion: remove technology barriers to connect more patients to more donors faster and ultimately save more lives.

With a shared IT infrastructure built on a NetApp® storage foundation, Be The Match is dramatically reducing the time to transplant and steadily increasing the number of transplants it facilitates annually. According to Jones, “Deploying a storage archi‑tecture that is efficient, that is flexible, is absolutely key to decision making and driving more patients to trans‑plant sooner.”

Eliminating BarriersWhen Jones arrived at Be The Match, he set out to rethink the role tech‑nology should play in helping the organization deliver on its mandate to save lives.

Diseases like leukemia and lymphoma can progress in a matter of months or weeks, so speed is critical. The best outcomes are achieved when Be The Match can deliver the right cells at precisely the right time in the process.

How much faster could Be The Match help facilitate transplants if it were not limited by its infrastructure? How many more lives could it potentially save?

Aligning IT with the organization’s goals became Jones’ top priority.

The flow of data is critical for all organizations, but for Be The Match, lives literally depend on it. In 2007, Be The Match was helping to facilitate 3,700 transplants annually. But how many more lives could Be The Match save if IT were an enabler, not a constraint?

“There is no way we could have achieved our growth numbers or gained the efficiencies we have…without building our IT foundation on NetApp storage.”Michael JonesChief Information OfficerBe The Match

“The problem was that without a complete IT transformation, we knew we simply could not handle the expected data growth and complexity with our existing landscape of dispa‑rate systems and storage silos.”

Transforming ITNetApp storage is at the heart of Be The Match’s IT transformation, accelerating the transplant process by speeding service delivery and improving information visibility. Seamless scalability and faster data integration and processing enable the organization to quickly develop and bring to market new lifesaving capabilities.

“Faster decisions and real‑time information have a direct impact on the lives of our patients. With NetApp at the foundation of our IT architecture, we’ve been able to speed up the entire process, help more people in less time, and do it cost effectively,” says Jeffrey W. Chell, M.D., chief executive officer, Be The Match.

With the built‑in efficiencies of its NetApp storage infrastructure, Be The Match has reduced capacity

requirements by 900TB and dramati‑cally simplified management, allowing it to scale from 65TB to 350TB without adding headcount.

Jones explains, “There is no way we could have achieved our growth numbers or gained the efficiencies we have—with no increases in headcount or expenses—without building our foundation on NetApp storage.”

Changing LivesAs a result of its overall transfor mation program, Be The Match is seeing results that extend far beyond the data center—results that are saving lives. Since 2007, the number of transplants per year has risen steadily from 3,700 to 5,500. Be The Match expects to reach its goal of 10,000 annual transplants by 2015.

Its newly integrated application suite, which includes consolidating its storage on NetApp, has enabled Be The Match to:

• Cut time to transplant by 15%. Be The Match has already shaved two weeks from time to transplant and is on track to meet its goal of dropping time to transplant from 96 to 45 days.

A CEO’s Perspective“Faster decisions and real‑time information directly impact the lives of our patients. With NetApp at the foundation of our IT architecture we’ve been able to speed up the entire process to help more people in less time, and do it cost effectively.”

Jeffrey W. Chell, M.D.Chief Executive OfficerBe The Match

Be The Match transformed IT into a catalyst for achieving lifesaving goals. Faster data access speeds the process of matching patients with potential donors.

Accelerating Data Flow to Save More Lives

3,700 transplants per year � 2007

5,500 transplants per year � 2011

10,000 transplants per year goal by 2015

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© 2011 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc. Specifications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the NetApp logo, and Go further, faster are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries National Marrow Donor Program, Be The Match, and Be The Match Registry are registered trademarks of National Marrow Donor Program. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. WP‑7144‑0911

“The need for Be The Match’s work might grow 100-fold over the next two decades… NetApp solutions will allow us to accelerate those opportunities to further improve and save lives.”Jeffrey W. Chell, M.D.Chief Executive OfficerBe The Match

• Double annual donor registrations. With its new shared IT infrastructure, Be The Match built a new donor recruitment portal that helped increase annual donor registrations from an average of 360,000 per year from 2000 to 2008 to about 850,000 per year for the last two years.

• Improve the accuracy of its matching algorithm. Be The Match uses a proprietary matching algorithm that is significantly more complex than blood typing pro‑grams. With the ability to more quickly integrate patient outcome data, Be The Match is accelerating the evolution of its algorithm to improve matching accuracy and boost survival rates.

• Extend lifesaving services to the global community. Today, 50% of Be The Match transplants cross an international border. Be The Match is helping to save more lives by making its search algorithm and resources available to 525 partners in more than 40 countries via a NetApp based private cloud.

The Bottom LineRethinking its storage infrastructure led Be The Match to an ambitious business transformation that is saving the lives of critically ill patients around the world. Once limited by its archi‑tecture, Be The Match can now take in more data, process it faster, and provide ready access to the information transplant physicians need, 24/7.

“The need for Be The Match’s work might grow 100‑fold over the next two decades, and our cellular

therapies could help treat many other diseases,” says Chell, “NetApp solutions will allow us to accelerate those opportunities to further improve and save lives.”

Join the RegistryIf you are interested in helping Be The Match support patients, join the Be The Match Registry today at www.BeTheMatch.org. You could be the one to save a life.

About Be The MatchBe The Match engages a growing community of people inspired to help patients who need a marrow or umbilical cord blood transplant from an unrelated donor. The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), a leader in the field of marrow and cord blood transplantation, operates Be The Match, which provides oppor‑tunities for the public to become involved in saving the lives of people with leukemia, lymphoma and other life‑threatening diseases. Volunteers can join the Be The Match Registry—the world’s largest and most diverse listing of potential marrow donors and donated cord blood units—as well as contribute financially to Be The Match Foundation or give their time.

About NetAppNetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficien‑cy. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.