How UNOS Uses ServiceNow AI Platform to Coordinate Life-Saving Organ Transplants
The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) leverages the ServiceNow AI Platform to coordinate thousands of organ transplants across the U.S. every year. By centralizing case management, enabling self-service portals, and deploying AI-powered IT operations, UNOS has quadrupled its case management capacity while managing nearly 300,000 support cases since 2018. The platform helps UNOS fulfill its 24/7 mission of saving lives with greater speed, accuracy, and efficiency.
Impact
132
Average organ transplants in the U.S. per day
4x
Increase in case management capacity
~300,000
Total support cases managed through ServiceNow since 2018
40,000+
Annual lives supported through transplant system
Challenge
UNOS relied on manual, static documents to manage complex, time-sensitive organ placement data, making it difficult to coordinate real-time information across multiple teams — a problem compounded by the shift to remote work following COVID-19.
Solution
UNOS deployed the ServiceNow AI Platform — including Customer Service Management (CSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) — to centralize case management, launch a self-service portal for transplant professionals, and enable AI-powered IT monitoring across its 24/7 operations.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“Every transplant represents a life. That means every moment counts and we need to find every opportunity to do things faster and more efficiently.”
“ServiceNow makes it simple and easy to get work done. People have more time to focus on our mission: saving lives.”
“We're a nonprofit with a cohesive IT team handling nationwide efforts. It was important that ServiceNow offered great out-of-the-box functionality that allowed us to start seeing benefits quickly and easily.”
“Our biggest priority is taking care of people. With ServiceNow, we can reach more people and ensure the services we deliver are of the highest quality.”
“We know that we can reach out to ServiceNow at any time to ask for advice about our technological roadmap, understand best practices, and get real-time feedback from their expert architects. They're the best kind of partner to have.”
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Full Story
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.