Carnegie Mellon University

Revolutionizing Organ Donation and Matching

Transforming expensive private jets into affordable transportation to increase organ transplants requires smart operations management, optimization, analytics, and financial planning. Increasing organ donations to facilitate those matches requires an understanding of behavioral sciences.

Combining them showcases the Tepper School's interdisciplinary approach to solving business and societal problems and leads to a revolutionary way to save lives.

Faculty Experts

sridar tayur

Sridhar Tayur, Ford Distinguished Research Chair and Professor of Operations Management

Website

Research Interests

  • Facilitating organ transplants through affordable on-demand transportation. Increasing organ and tissue supply by increasing consent rates via nudge videos. Fair allocation of livers.
  • Opioid Use Disorder: Using wearables to reduce relapse rates through timely personalized interventions (joint with Alan Scheller-Wolf).
  • Personalized Cancer Therapy: Machine learning algorithms to predict Immuno-oncology drug response.
  • Overtesting: Disentangling the roles of physicians, reimbursement structure, insurance plans, legal risk, and patient utility.

Courses

  • 47-762 Health Care Operations
  • 45-965 Service Management: Go-to-Market Strategy and Operations

Industry Partners

  • Massachusetts General Hospital, UC San Francisco, BehAIvoir, Mitra Biotech
  • Organ Procurement Organizations: NJ Sharing Network, Nevada, Georgia, California

Alan Scheller-Wolf

Alan Scheller-Wolf, Richard M. Cyert Professor of Operations Management

WEBSITE

Research Interests

  • Blood Platelet Inventory Management: How to manage ordering and distribution of products such as blood platelets in the face of their short shelf life and age-dependent demand.
  • Medical Surplus Redistribution: Determining how Global Links, a medical relief and development organization, can use their information to forecast supply and demand for donated surplus medical supplies.
  • Opioid Use Disorder: Using wearables to reduce relapse rates through timely personalized interventions (joint with Sridhar Tayur).
  • Consistent Staffing for Long-Term Care Through On-Call Pools: How different strategies, like an on-call pool, can potentially lower costs and improve consistency of care in nursing homes.
  • Fairness of multi-listing for organ transplants.

Collaboration and Partnerships

  • American Red Cross
  • Compassionate Care Hospice

Mustafa Akan

Mustafa Akan, Associate Professor of Operations Management

WEBSITE

Research Interests

  • Equitable Distribution of Donor Livers Among Patients:
    • Creating a new open-source computer simulation model for the U.S. liver allocation system to evaluate alternative liver allocation policies.
    • Developing a better scoring system for listing primary liver cancer patients for liver transplantation.
    • Reducing gender and height disparity in access to liver transplants.
  • Medical Urgency-Efficiency Trade-Off in Liver Allocation System Design:
    • Proposing viable alternatives to the current allocation scheme with an eye on the trade-off between medical urgency and efficiency.
  • Personalized Medicine: Mitigating risks of anti-coagulation treatment using genetic information.
  • Overtesting: Economics of diagnostic test ordering and its unintended consequences.
  • Child Adoption: Improving the matching process and child welfare outcomes via market design.

Courses

  • 47-744 Analytical & Structural Marketing Models
  • 70-476 Service Operations Management

Industry Partners

  • Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, University of California San Francisco, University of Wisconsin-Madison, The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange