Organizing human organ donations

BANTAY GOBYERNO

Ike Seneres

Generally speaking, it is good to talk but in order to have a sense of balance; it is also good to listen. I thank the Lord that as much as He has given me the talent to talk, He has also given me the talent to listen, and that is how I gain new knowledge that enables me to talk more, about many more subject matters.

After patiently listening to some professional people who are very conversant about the subject of organ donations, I finally understood how the system (or the lack of it) works (or does not work). To go directly to my point, there appears to be no working database of organ donors and donees and much less, there also appears to be no system for ordering and delivering these resources.

Quite clearly, you can rule out billing and collection, because the law prohibits the buying and selling of human organs. It does not mean however that hospitals and other providers could not bill for the processing and storage of these resources.

Although the technology for electronic commerce could technically be used for “ordering” and “delivering” human organs, there are limitations in doing so, because these resources are “beyond the commerce of man”, so to speak. Challenging as it may be however, there is a “supply” and “demand” for human organs and it is very important to have a working system for such, in order to improve the lives of many people at the very least, or even to save their lives, when it comes to life and death situations.

Of course, I will not say that the existing manual and analog solutions will not work, but no one can argue against the logic that automated and electronic solutions are not only better, these are also faster. What that means is that more lives could be improved or more lives could be saved, as the case may be.

As it is supposed to be, applicants of driver’s licenses are asked to tick on their application forms whether they would want to be an organ donor or not, presumably if they would die in an accident of course. I found out however that this is more of a decorative feature of the actual license, because there is really no system for collecting or harvesting organs from a deceased driver in the event of a fatal accident, and there is also apparently no system for storing or delivering the same however.

That is just too bad or too sad, because all the ingredients for collecting, harvesting, storing and delivering human organs are already present. As usual, some detractors would say right away that there is no budget for this project and therefore it could not be done, but I say otherwise that if there is a will, there is a way. Besides, I am about done in developing an online blood bank, and the software that I am using for it could already be tweaked as a template.

Actually, ticking a box in the driver’s license is not the only way to signify a desire to donate one’s own organs. One’s desire could be manifested when one is applying for many other public documents, such as a passport or a business permit, for example. What the public wants to know however is whether or not the system is transparent or incorruptible, because the surviving family members would not want the body parts or organs of their relatives to be desecrated if these are transplanted to an “undesirable host”.

As it is supposed to be however, the relatives of donors could not really demand what goes where, if the organ donation is valid in the first place. Perhaps resit has not happened yet, but in some evil or immoral scenario, human organs of celebrities could fetch a higher “price”, even if everybody knows that organs are not for sale.

                As it is now, there are many technologies that could be used so that beneficiaries could get the human organs that they need, and it would really be a waste of human lives if we could not put these technologies to work. As I see it, time and motion is the biggest challenge of this supply chain, because there is a time limit, the ultimate deadline before a human organ spoils and could not be transplanted anymore. It is a challenge of motion, because these organs have to move as fast as possible in order for these to become useful.

With millions of cell phones in our hands however, it would be very easy to develop a mobile app that could make this whole process faster and better. Fortunately, a global company based in Singapore (www.ccs.sg) has already developed a template for a virtual blood bank that could now be used as a template for a human organs bank.

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