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The Armenian Bone Marrow Donor Registry founded in July 1998 in Armenia, is a non-profit organization. Although Armenians are considered Caucasian, their unique genetic make up makes it very hard for them to find matches for transplantation. Its mission is to save lives by creating a bone marrow donor registry, which with the volunteer recruitment of Armenian donors worldwide, will increase the pool of existing international donors and thus give a chance of survival to patients with Leukemia or other blood related diseases. The plan is to have 10,000 donors within four years.
In the words of Sevak Avagyan, the director of the registry, the decision was taken that from the beginning the registry would start using the best tools available to meet their requirements.
When it came to picking software for managing the details and complex reporting of the registry's donors and patients the decision was taken to adopt the software system, named SOLAR, used by the Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Trust (ANBMT) in London, analysed and developed by CDP.
However the need to prepare the registry for the use of the software had been underestimated and here lay the real challenge. There were two main problems the first was that the registry had not appreciated the complexity of the software. The need for security, disk plans and backup strategies among other administration tasks had not been addressed. The second problem was that the requirements of the laboratory appeared to differ from what was provided by the software. However the staff at the registry dived in and took to the task of mastering the new software. CDP provided guidance on many areas of system and database administration and liaised with the registries own IT consultants on future plans. By discussion and careful analyses CDP and the laboratory staff at the registry were able to reconcile the requirements for the labs without having to make system modifications. This was due, in no small measure, to the flexibility of the searching algorithms used in the software. The result was a successful roll out of the SOLAR software for the Armenian Bone Marrow Registry.
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