NMDP selects Velos to supply new Product Fulfillment and CDR System

Jan 20 2011

The National Marrow Donor Program® (NMDP) announced today that it has selected Velos Inc., a leading California health care software provider, to supply its new Product Fulfillment and Clinical Data Repository (CDR) System. It will serve as an enhanced electronic medical record system and is integral to conducting many of the process transactions that support bone marrow and umbilical cord blood transplants between donors and patients.

A bone marrow or cord blood transplant can be used to treat patients with life-threatening blood, immune system or genetic disorders. As many as 10,000 patients may benefit from an unrelated transplant each year in the United States alone. Through its Be The Match Registry®, the NMDP provides transplant centers and patients access to more than 9 million potential donors and 185,000 cord blood units, as well as donors and cord blood units listed on international registries.

"The Velos applications are central to the NMDP's business transformation program, which aims to help more patients get the transplant they need, in the optimal timeframe," said Michael Jones, chief information officer of the NMDP. "We expect that our newly integrated application suite, which includes the Velos software, will help us reach our overall transformation goal of improving the time to transplant by nearly 25 percent."

Improving time to transplant is vitally important, as it directly impacts patient survival. Research shows that patients transplanted earlier in their disease stage have better outcomes than patients with advanced disease. The NMDP currently facilitates more than 5,000 transplants each year. The current time to transplant averages 96 days.

Velos is designing a solution to house, integrate and manage patient and stem cell source data records that meet the NMDP's needs for both medical and other records related to donors and cellular therapy products. The new system will help manage clinical records, donor medical records and donated cord blood inventory information. This includes managing and tracking adult donor and cord blood unit match requests for patients in need of a transplant – from the time potential matches are identified, to further testing to determine the best match, through transplant.

Additionally, many of the NMDP's network partners including donor centers, public cord blood banks, apheresis centers and collection centers will have access to the system, streamlining communication and speeding the overall time to transplant for patients. The Velos back engine is capable of processing massive data complexity and volume, but is designed to be easy to learn and use.

"Cutting time to transplant has a direct impact on the lives of patients awaiting transplants, and we are excited to be working with the NMDP on this. This project further ratifies our long-held belief that structured, geographically distributed, and compliance-aware management of groups of individuals and biologic products is a key element of the practice of specialty medicine of the future," said Amar Chahal, M.D. of Velos.