National Kidney Registry Migrated to Microsoft Azure Cloud–Significantly Boosting Speed With Multiple Matching Capabilities For Paired Transplantation Candidates

When you visit the website it shows 464 transplants facilitated to date.  With the new Azure cloud service the matching capacity has increased 400% which is a deeper and heavier search that can end up finding kidneys faster for those in need of the life saving transplant.  This is great and shows how the cloud can serve to improve and create solutions in healthcare.  BD 

Press Release:

The National Kidney Registry’s new SMELAC matching system has been successfully migrated to Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing platform, significantly boosting paired exchange match processing speeds. The announcement was made at the American Transplant Congress in Boston last night at the 4^th Annual National Kidney Registry Awards Event by Garet Hil, CEO of the National Kidney Registry and Wes Anderson, Microsoft’s Vice President of Public Sector Services.

The Windows Azure cloud computing platform has increased National Kidney Registry’s matching capacity by 400% allowing multiple match runs to execute simultaneously. Already the world leader in paired exchange transplantation, the ability to execute multiple match runs simultaneously will enhance the National Kidney Registry’s ability to facilitate even more paired exchange transplants.

 

In describing the significance of this breakthrough, Mr. Wes Anderson, Vice President for U.S. Public Sector Services at Microsoft said, “The National Kidney Registry team realized early-on that scaling their success in kidney matching requires variable computing capability that may grow exponentially at very short notice, presenting important conditions for moving back-end processes to a cloud-based solution. By fully leveraging Windows Azure, the National Kidney Registry is continuing its amazing work of helping to provide a long and normal life for the ultimate benefactors of this endeavor – those among us who need the help of the community to overcome end-stage renal disease”.

 

Mr. Hil added, “Microsoft continues to provide valuable technical support as we continue to grow our program. The migration to Azure is the latest advance that is allowing our computing capacity to scale up as our pool of incompatible pairs expands”.

 

Expanding on the importance of this latest technology advance, Dr. Marc Melcher, transplant surgeon at Stanford University and Research Director for National Kidney Registry said, “More and more transplant centers are using kidney paired exchange transplantation to help their patients in kidney failure, and the computational power required to support the sophisticated matching algorithms that sift through and evaluate all the potential matches has been growing exponentially”.

About the National Kidney Registry

The National Kidney Registry www.kidneyregistry.org is the leader in paired exchange transplantation and has facilitated more paired exchange transplants than any other organization in the world. The National Kidney Registry is a nonprofit organization with the mission to save and improve the lives of people facing kidney failure by increasing the quality, speed, and number of living donor transplants.