Be The Match manages the largest and most diverse bone marrow and blood stem cell registry in the world. Every 3 minutes in the United States, someone is diagnosed with blood cancer. For thousands of cancer patients, cellular therapy through a life-saving bone marrow or blood stem cell donation can be the cure, but 70% do not have fully matched eligible donors in their families. Across their global partnerships, Be The Match facilitates access to more than 30 million potential donors, finding a match for 76-97% of patients, with no intentions of slowing down.

Tracy Smith, Sr. Director of Data and Analytics at Be The Match said, “Data plays a vital role in their mission to democratize cellular therapy. We have algorithms that identify well matched donors based on genomic data and also provide a significant amount of services to facilitate both the donor and patient’s pathway to transplant.” Part of their ongoing challenge is scaling and sharing data effectively. Be The Match wants to integrate with providers and healthcare systems to get timely comprehensive data, then it needs to be shared back with clinicians to understand patterns and trends to help advance research.

Why Snowflake and DAS42

Be The Match launched a business intelligence modernization project in the hopes of streamlining data accessibility. With Snowflake as their data lake and single source of truth, Smith’s team could architect and design data assets that allowed them to quickly deliver relevant operational data to end users, like front line operations teams and case managers.

Once Be The Match implemented Snowflake, they decided to bring DAS42, a cloud-data consulting firm, on as a strategic partner to help facilitate enterprise-wide adoption. 

“DAS42 was our strategic partner for our business intelligence modernization initiative. The team helped us think through how to leverage Snowflake and design an architecture that could be leveraged across the entire organization. ”

Tracy Smith, Sr. Director of Data and Analytics, Be The Match

After helping to establish data literacy across the organization, DAS42 helped Be The Match design and architect a data solution on Snowflake to connect data across their operations and research teams. Combining this previously siloed data reveals rich insight for Be The Match to better understand donor and patient journeys. For example, in collaboration with research clinics, they can track which patients come for help, continue to get alternative therapy, and track their progress that may benefit others.

“The Snowflake Data Cloud and DAS42 have empowered Be The Match data consumers and stakeholders to utilize self-service analytics in a way that helps them get data they need at their fingertips to ultimately help save more patient lives.”

Tracy Smith,  Sr. Director of Data and Analytics, Be The Match

Donor readiness score

Historically, it’s been a significant challenge to find a well matched, mentally prepared, and available donor on the registry, especially for patients who are ethnically diverse. Smith’s team has been focused on building and delivering a Donor Readiness Score tool that predicts the likelihood that a donor will say “yes” when contacted. “With Snowflake and our data scientists, it will be exciting to deliver predictive model scores through our application directly to transplant centers to utilize for source selection,” said Smith.

What’s next? Improving patient outcomes through external data collaboration

With Be The Match’s business intelligence modernization journey being such an overwhelming success, Smith’s team is setting their sights on data collaboration to drive innovation. “We are focused on collaborating with other organizations in the healthcare space through Snowflake’s secure data sharing and marketplace. Our engineers and data scientists are excited about how Snowpark can make a difference in their workloads. And we are looking forward to our continued partnership with DAS42 to establish how we can use data in new ways to save patient lives,” Smith said.

Watch the video testimonial from Be The Match and DAS42.