NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) offers the blood service for England and the organ donation and transplant service for the whole of the UK. Completely reliant on volunteers registering to become donors, the service found that their systems were being overwhelmed when high profile celebrities helped with their recruitment campaigns and they needed a more agile, responsive system to manage demand and interact with their donors.
Working in conjunction with Microsoft, NHSBT has harnessed Azure to develop an online booking service, plus an app for mobile devices, that accelerates the donor registration process from around a month under the previous system to a matter of hours. These innovations have had the added bonus of appealing to a younger demographic which has increased donor numbers substantially, whilst significantly cutting infrastructure costs for the organisation. NHSBT can often see traffic to their site increase 100-fold in a very short timeframe during recruitment campaigns and they have been delighted at the agility that they now have with Azure to cope in this situation.