How UNOS Uses ServiceNow AI Platform to Coordinate Life-Saving Organ Transplants

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) operates at the intersection of urgency and complexity. As the nonprofit managing the U.S. organ donation and transplant system under a federal government contract, UNOS facilitates an average of 132 life-saving transplants every single day. When a donor organ becomes available, every minute matters — from identifying a recipient match to coordinating transport and surgery. With over 40,000 lives depending on this system annually, UNOS needed a technology foundation capable of keeping pace with the relentless demands of its mission.

Before adopting the ServiceNow AI Platform, UNOS relied on static documents and manual processes to manage organ placement data. These approaches struggled to keep up with the constant flow of new and changing information — a challenge that became even more acute in the remote-work environment that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. The Organ Center team, Service Desk, and Patient Services team all faced bottlenecks that slowed communication, created data silos, and limited the number of cases they could handle simultaneously.

UNOS deployed ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) to unify its operational workflows across three key teams. The Organ Center now captures all organ placement details — donor information, surgery schedules, transport logistics, and communication logs — within encrypted ServiceNow cases that follow the organ from procurement to transplant. Real-time dashboards give staff instant visibility into active cases, while seamless handoffs between shift changes ensure no critical detail is lost. The Service Desk adopted case templates to accelerate issue resolution, and the Patient Services team gained a structured way to support patients, donors, and families throughout the transplant journey.

A self-service portal built on ServiceNow became a transformative addition for the broader transplant community. Organ procurement organizations, transplant hospitals, and medical professionals can now submit requests, track task progress, and find answers to common questions — such as password resets or living donation policies — through AI-powered search, without ever picking up the phone. This shift from reactive phone-based support to proactive portal-driven service delivery quadrupled the team's case management capacity. IT Operations Management (ITOM) further strengthened UNOS's infrastructure by enabling proactive anomaly detection, predictive outage prevention, and automated root cause analysis — critical capabilities for an organization that must operate reliably around the clock, 365 days a year.

Since implementing ServiceNow in 2018, UNOS has managed approximately 300,000 support cases across its teams. The platform has not only improved operational efficiency but has also deepened the quality of care UNOS provides to the transplant community. For Ralph Medina, Assistant Director of IT Cloud Platform Engineering, the impact is clear: ServiceNow frees his team to focus on what matters most — saving lives.