麻豆村

When a patient has an organ transplant, clear, accessible information can make all the difference.

That鈥檚 why Transplants.org turned to 麻豆村 Trustees Professor of Management Science and Healthcare Informatics and a team of graduate students to analyze patient education materials from transplant centers across the U.S.

The project is personal for Tristan Mace, founder and executive chair of Transplants.org. At 31, Mace abruptly went into quadruple organ failure and underwent an emergency heart transplant. The experience inspired him to create the nonprofit.

With the mission of improving outcomes and access, Mace and Padman evaluated a variety of topics that were important to transplant patients. Transplants.org identified the transplant patient handbook as one critical aspect of care that could potentially be improved to meet the evolving needs of patients.

The transplant bible

Organ transplant candidates and recipients typically receive a printed binder of information from the care team at their transplant centers.

The quality, depth and breadth of information provided can vary significantly among centers, and even within the same transplant center, depending on which organ a patient has had transplanted.

Physicians consider the handbook a safety net for navigating day-to-day life before and after surgery; patients sometimes call it 鈥渢he transplant bible.鈥�

鈥淲e wanted to look at the similarities and differences in handbook information across transplant centers to see how we could improve what is oftentimes insufficient or inconsistent guidance across important topics for patients,鈥� Mace said.

Those topics range from surgery risks and the waitlist process to immunosuppression medications, lifestyle, travel, finances, reproductive health and support resources.

The interdisciplinary student team 鈥� which included students Jaimie An and Julia Duken, student Abdulaziz Abdulakhadov, students Rahul Pujari and Aashna Anand Shetty, and students Sara Clemente, Yoko (Jewel) Kentilitisca, and Sharon John 鈥� analyzed 100 handbooks from 23 transplant centers, large and small, across the U.S.

Some handbooks were geared toward pretransplant patients, others to post-transplant, and some for both. The binders included information related to the five most common organ transplants: heart, kidney, liver, lung and pancreas.

Mace partnered with Padman and the Heinz College student team on a semester-long capstone project to produce an in-depth comparative analysis of patient materials across U.S. organ transplant centers. The result, powered by natural language processing and generative artificial intelligence methods to produce models with data-driven evidence, demonstrates the current state of organ transplant patient educational materials in the U.S., highlighting the challenges in maintaining consistency, completeness and currency of the content. By building awareness of the discrepancies in the content for a complex patient population, this effort is anticipated to inform and influence transplant centers in the development of future patient education handbooks that best serve transplant recipients everywhere.

鈥淭his project provides a way for transplant centers to compare their patient education materials to a baseline, to identify where their content aligns 鈥� or doesn鈥檛 鈥� with other health systems,鈥� Clemente said. 鈥淭hey haven鈥檛 had this information before, so it gives them the benchmark they were looking for.鈥�

Padman, who advised the student team throughout the project, emphasized the significance of this kind of applied learning.

鈥淭his was an opportunity for students to engage deeply with a real-world health care challenge using cutting-edge AI and analytics methods,鈥� Padman said. 鈥淭heir work not only supports better outcomes for patients and health systems, but also showcases how technology, analytics and policy can be aligned in the service of public good of great societal value.鈥�

The benchmarking initiative was strengthened by participation from many of the nation鈥檚 leading transplant centers, including Mayo Clinic, Vanderbilt Health, UCLA Health, UCSF Health, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Duke Health, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Massachusetts General Hospital and others.

鈥淲e鈥檝e been told this is the largest patient educational analysis in the history of U.S. transplantation,鈥� Mace said.

Conquering technical challenges

The handbooks ranged from a few pages to a few hundred pages each. The students were tasked with analyzing thousands of pages of material.

鈥淪ometimes it was a PDF document with a hundred pages, or sometimes it was a 20-slide PowerPoint deck,鈥� Kentilitisca explained. 鈥淭here were really big variations when it came to the documents.鈥�

One major challenge was figuring out how to account for images and tables included in the materials. The students鈥� model had to be able to incorporate the information contained in the image in a way that a large language model could read.

鈥淎nother key concern for us was the variation in how similar information was phrased 鈥� for example, one source might say, 鈥楳eet with a financial counselor,鈥� while another used slightly different wording,鈥� Duken said. 鈥淕rouping these variations into meaningful categories for visualization proved challenging, but it was essential for providing stakeholders with clear, actionable insights.鈥�

Though it鈥檚 possible to tackle such a project manually, it鈥檚 not realistic. As an experiment, Kentilitisca said, team members tried combing through six manuals and entering every item of data into an Excel file.

鈥淚t took hours,鈥� Kentilitisca said. 鈥淚t would鈥檝e been an insane amount of work to read through every handbook individually.鈥�

The value of a public-private partnership

One key factor in the success of this project was the existing partnership between Transplants.org and Oracle. Rebecca Laborde, chief scientist at Oracle, was an early strategic partner for Transplants.org鈥檚 efforts, and Oracle is a design partner for the nonprofit. Oracle has been involved with the organization from the start, advising Transplants.org from a technological perspective.

Because this project was part of the students鈥� capstone experience, they had an aggressive 15-week timeframe to deliver a solution. About halfway through the semester, Mace connected the students with Laborde.

鈥淏eing able to closely work in conjunction with Oracle, who provided pro bono technical expertise, really gave the students a great complementary skillset and compute resources to analyze handbooks at the required scale,鈥� Mace said.

The Heinz College team appreciated the partnership as well.

鈥淓xciting collaborations like this one 鈥� where academic research and insight, industry expertise, and nonprofit missions intersect 鈥� are incredibly powerful,鈥� Padman said. 鈥淭he students were able to quickly adapt and apply complex technical tools in a constrained timeframe, which is a testament to their preparation, the inspiring goal they aimed to achieve, and the collaborative environment we were able to cultivate and support.鈥�

This hands-on collaboration not only strengthened the students' technical skills but also underscored the value of having industry experts readily available to guide them through real-world challenges.

鈥淓specially given the short amount of time, there was a lot (of existing Oracle technology) out there that we could lean on, and there was a lot that we needed to figure out how to adapt to our use case,鈥� Clemente said. 鈥淚t's not like you can just learn the concepts and then apply them. You have to really think about which concepts make sense in your context. The Oracle team helped us a lot with that process.鈥�

During the last two weeks of the project, students met almost daily with technical experts from Oracle.

鈥淭he students had already done quite a bit of work,鈥� Laborde said. 鈥淲e were asked to come in and offer technical expertise to assist the students in achieving their goals in this accelerated time frame. We really leaned in on identifying how the existing technology could be used to supplement the work they鈥檇 already done.鈥�

Oracle supplied the team with an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) tenancy that included compute resources and access to generative AI models and database capabilities. These resources enabled the team to store the data and protect data privacy and confidentiality. The use of OCI resources simplified the final project handoff from the students to Transplants.org. The collaboration also allowed Transplants.org to continue working with Oracle to move the project forward after the students completed their task.

A landmark result

Transplants.org recently shared the final product with all the participating transplant centers as well as representatives from the U.S. government鈥檚 Health Resources and Services Administration and Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.

Transplants.org is in the process of publishing the findings from this project and is presenting an abstract at the World Transplant Congress (WTC) in August 2025. Ultimately, Mace hopes to expand the handbook database to include every transplant center across the U.S.

鈥淭his is a truly landmark result for the community,鈥� Mace said. 鈥淲e鈥檙e thrilled.鈥�

Laborde said that the goal of the project is to take the knowledge contained in the handbooks and help develop a care platform around a patient as they learn to navigate their new normal.

鈥淯nderstanding the full landscape of expert knowledge from sources the patient and the care community know they can trust and customizing that expertise to the individual health journey for a patient, I think that's the real potential of this effort,鈥� Laborde said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 so valuable for helping people live their best life as they move forward with their transplant.鈥�

The experience was transformative for the students as well as the transplant patients who will benefit from their efforts.

鈥淚t was inspiring to be part of something that has the potential to be so impactful,鈥� Duken said.

鈥淥ur team brought together students from different programs which made it exciting to work with people who had expertise in different areas, and there was a bigger goal than just completing our capstone project," John said. 鈥淲e understood why we鈥檙e doing this and for whom we鈥檙e doing it.鈥�