A new approach to organ donation

Would you donate an organ to someone you have never met?

A new tool from Montefiore Health System in New York combines technology, psychology, and storytelling to help those in need of an organ reach potential donors.

The platform, which helps patients create a personalized appeal video, is called “Live and Let Live” and it is just now moving out of beta testing.  

Patients tell their own story in their own words and then, “[W]e use natural language processing (AI) to parse the user’s inputs and understand the verbal significance of words or phrases in their response,” according to the ad agency, Alto. The software next culls through user uploaded photography, along with images from a stock photo library, and offers the patient options for the imagery that can be used in their video.

The result is an emotionally powerful and personalized “ad,” complete with music, that looks professionally produced, even though the software can create these videos in a matter of minutes once it has all the inputs. Potential donors will be able to log in, watch the videos, and internalize the patients’ stories.

The hospital says the storytelling approach is intended to create a human connection that will spur a donation. Indeed, research suggests that donors to causes are less motivated by statistics than by individual stories because we feel empathy for people, not numbers – and empathy motivates helping behavior.  In other words, I may be less interested in helping 874 people who lost homes in a hurricane than I would be in helping Maureen, who lost her home in a hurricane.

“Live and Let Live” does raise some ethical concerns. A risk is that people who are better storytellers might attract donors faster that people who have been on the list longer but who are less articulate or less emotionally forthcoming. (Unconscious biases around race, gender, or physical appearance could also affect donation decisions in numerous ways.)

The hospital acknowledges this, but its hope is that that dilemma can be overcome simply by attracting more potential donors into the system.