Nonprofit Anthony Nolan speeds life-saving stem cell donor matches through the cloud

The world is a busy place. Every day, more than 293 billion emails are sent. Three million lightning strikes hit the planet. And UK nonprofit Anthony Nolan helps save the lives of three people with a blood cancer or disorder.

Anthony Nolan, a charity founded by Shirley Nolan in honor of her son, matches patients with volunteers willing to donate stem cells. The organization also leads research into stem cell transplantation, advocates for blood cancer patients and their families, helps patients navigate treatment, and expands its stem cell register so more people can access critical transplants.

“We’re in the business of saving lives,” explains Danny Attias, Chief Digital Information Officer at Anthony Nolan and listed as the top CIO in the UK in the 2020 CIO 100. “In many cases, if there’s no treatment, there’s not much hope. So yes, we are delivering life-saving transplants. We are also delivering hope.”

Anthony Nolan runs on the philosophy of “continuous improvement on all our technology platforms,” Attias adds. “Processes change, business models change, patient needs change, so we make changes every day, every week.” Most recently, the nonprofit is working with Microsoft Partner Network member Formus Pro to revamp its stem cell donor management systems and bring a level of modernity and productivity to a worldwide network of stem cell registries. It uses Microsoft cloud services—Dynamics 365, Azure, and Microsoft 365—to ensure patients can find the best donor match, no matter where they are in the world.

“If we can go more efficiently, go a bit faster, we increase the chances of a life-saving transplant. We also reduce cost, which means we can recruit more people to join the stem cell donor register and do more research,” Attias says. “Operational efficiency through technology means we can directly improve the chances of someone’s survival.”

Upgrading legacy technology for “purposeful” efficiencies 

Talk to just about any employee at Anthony Nolan, and you’ll immediately notice their passion for saving the lives of people with blood cancer and blood disorders. The nonprofit’s legacy technology needed to be upgraded to support that dedication.

Information about potential donors and recipients was kept on a different system than that of volunteers, financial supporters, and others. Without a single view, it was more difficult for the transplant, marketing, and fundraising teams to find the details to cultivate the most meaningful relationships possible. When an events coordinator called a prospective volunteer who expressed interest in raising money for the nonprofit through the London Marathon, for example, staff couldn’t easily see if the runner had ever financially donated to the organization.

Nonprofit employees also used a 22-year-old, email-based system to communicate with more than 100 other registries around the world. The partnerships are critical to finding the best match for a patient in need, but the legacy platform was “clunky,” explains Stuart Powell, Software Developer and Consultant at Microsoft Gold Partner Formus Pro, which has supported Anthony Nolan’s digital transformation for nine years. “On such an old system, there were hundreds of failed messages a day, which someone had to check and process. A support team was dedicated to fixing problems.” That took valuable hours in a time-sensitive matching process that Attias refers to as “the last port of call for treatment.”

Anthony Nolan turned to Formus Pro to tackle these obstacles. “We can’t keep our platforms fresh and relevant on our own. That’s why we rely on Formus Pro,” Attias says. The nonprofit recognized it didn’t have the resources to recruit and retain Dynamics 365 developers on staff, and so it continually works with the digital transformation services company to update systems.

Customizing communication with donors and supporters

Anthony Nolan stores information in two separate CRM (customer relationship management) systems—one for transplant donors and recipients, and the other for supporters ranging from volunteers to financial backers. The divide between the two didn’t allow staff to see the often deep and multifaceted connection supporters had to the nonprofit. For example, a stem cell transplant recipient might later become a volunteer, and someone who provided blood samples for genetic research might also make a monthly financial gift. 

To get this single source of truth about everyone the nonprofit interacts with, Formus Pro built an Azure link to connect the separate systems. With this “single supporter view,” users see the relevant information stored in the other system, another Dynamics 365 instance, without switching back and forth between platforms. The databases sync in real time and prevent duplicate entries for people involved in multiple areas of the nonprofit’s work. “Anthony Nolan stays in constant communication with volunteers, donors, and patients,” Powell says. “Now it’ll see all interactions across the CRM systems to have a complete view of each person.”

Anthony Nolan collects personally identifiable information (PII) along with sensitive medical data. That’s why Formus Pro built two layers of permissions to ensure staff see only the information they need to do their job—and no more. Firstly, permission settings within Dynamics 365 limit what staff can access based on their role.

Secondly, the Azure engine that acts as a window between the two CRMs is written with rules to limit the type of information that can be viewed on the other system. For example, staff on the fundraising side need to know if a supporter has also been a donor or recipient of a transplant; they would never need to know a person’s tissue type, though, so rules within the engine don’t allow access to that data.

“The relationships we build are really important,” explains Ann O’Leary, Director of Donor Transplantation Services at Anthony Nolan. “When we contact a potential match for a patient, we’re asking them to provide blood samples and ultimately donate stem cells to a person in need. The single supporter view helps us use the information we already have to build that relationship from the beginning.”

Finding donor matches more efficiently

Finding a match for blood donation is fairly straightforward, since there are only eight blood types. Matching stem cells is more difficult. Doctors look for someone who is a similar or identical tissue type by comparing the proteins on the surface of cells. The closer the pairing, the more likely a successful transplant.

Access to the 40 million people who have signed up on stem cell registers worldwide is vital to find matches for patients battling blood cancers and disorders. Anthony Nolan has more direct access in the United Kingdom to Caucasian donors, which limits its ability to find the best match for patients of other ethnicities on its own. That is why international access is especially important for ethnic minorities.

Stem cell registries recognized this interdependency and created an email-based system called EMDIS that allowed organizations to search databases worldwide. This decades-old system results in tens of thousands of messages sent to Anthony Nolan each day. The nonprofit couldn’t build a new system—the more than 100 other registries still used EMDIS—so Formus Pro built an Azure link that layered on top.

Created in Azure DevOps, this layer uses custom APIs to more securely analyze, process, and sort messages into queues. The procedure enacts every step—from receiving a request to checking the Anthony Nolan database to returning information about potential matches—in a sequence that “works like clockwork,” explains Malgorzata Urban, Director of Product at Anthony Nolan. “It helps us move through the steps of finding a match more quickly.”

An Azure function processes these messages hourly, including Anthony Nolan’s own requests for potential matches. “This helps streamline operations. Users don’t have to remember to hit send on every message or move messages in the process because it happens automatically,” Urban says.

Automation and bypassing the previous mistake-prone process saves hassle and time, O’Leary says. “Reducing time spent on admin gives us time to support transplant centers better,” she adds. “We’re able to be more proactive and responsive.” Instead of working through emails, staff can provide updates to patients and transplant centers, run new searches, and track down donor samples that haven’t yet been returned.

Analyzing the data in the Azure engine connecting the two CRM systems will also help staff speed the process from request for a match to successful transplant. Crunching the numbers on who opens marketing emails or responds to phone calls will help the transplantation services team understand who may be more likely to respond about a potential match—quickly. “Have they responded to an email, updated their information through fundraising, donated to us? We’ll understand not only individuals but the cohort of people we’re working with to reduce the time we spend tracking someone down,” O’Leary says.

Helping patients get transplants in time

The process of checking worldwide registers, requesting additional samples from potential donors, and orchestrating a transplant can take up to several months. Once donor stem cells are collected, they must get to the patient within 72 hours, so there is quite literally no time to waste. “Reliability is so important to the work we do,” O’Leary says. “Our coordinators need access to this technology wherever they are, around the clock. If they get a call at 4:00 AM that there’s a problem at an airport across the world, they need access to the systems to do whatever is needed to get the donation through.”

Running everything in Microsoft cloud services gives staff nonstop access to this information. Stem cell donor registers, match requests, and details about hospitals, transplant centers, and even pharmaceutical companies are all housed in the cloud behind leading-edge security safeguards.

This anywhere, anytime access has become more important than ever since the pandemic began. Anthony Nolan staff can more securely find donor and supporter data in Dynamics 365, respond to match requests in Azure, and collaborate with colleagues via Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint in Microsoft 365.

“Everything we do is reliant on technology, and for us it’s Microsoft,” O’Leary adds. “We use it to perform our mission.”

Protecting supporter data 

Security is important to all nonprofits; it is especially critical for Anthony Nolan. “Data privacy and respecting the integrity of the relationships we build is absolutely paramount in everything we do,” explains Attias. “Donors trust us with their DNA, medical information, and more.”

Security begins with how the nonprofit’s platforms are built. “It’s crucial you have proficiency and support through a partner to make sure platforms are designed properly,” Attias says. “We live and breathe stem cell transplantation; we rely on our partner network, which lives and breathes technology, to make sure we’ve got the latest tech, security, and integration on all our platforms.”

Running nearly all of the nonprofit’s operations in the cloud provides a solid layer of protection to organizational information and supporter data alike. Microsoft cloud services continually update in real time, preventing the all-too-familiar scenario of technology “getting older and less relevant every day,” Attias says. 

The nonprofit’s Enterprise Mobility + Security license provides a dashboard with a view of security organization wide. “It also gives the support team an immediate alert if a server, website, or platform has flatlined,” Attias adds.

“Our entire charity is based on reputation and trust. If there’s a leak, it’s very hard to recover from that,” Attias says, which is why Anthony Nolan independently verifies its security safeguards. The nonprofit also tracks its Microsoft security scores, runs penetration testing on all platforms, and continuously monitors for unauthorized use or cyberattacks.

All the technology ladders up to Anthony Nolan’s underlying mission. “We’re asking people to give not only their time, but give of themselves physically,” O’Leary says. “It’s incredible what we enable donors to do. We get to be the link in the chain that helps save someone’s life.”