Providing Comfort, Normalcy, and Safety Through a Difficult Time
Mid-America Transplant is a private, nonprofit organ procurement organization based in St. Louis, Missouri. The organization facilitates organ and tissue donation in the Missouri, Illinois, and Arkansas areas. Mid-America Transplant also makes a significant effort to support patients and their families throughout the arduous process of waiting for and undergoing a transplant.
Because there is often a very short window between an organ becoming available and when it must be transplanted, patients generally need to be nearby at a moment’s notice. To accommodate this, the Mid-America Transplant Family House provides low or no-cost, mid to long-term housing for patients (and families) awaiting or recovering from organ and tissue transplants.
In 2020, Mid-America Transplant announced plans for a 34,000-square-foot building that would double the Family House’s previous capacity. Tech Electronics has held a long-standing relationship with Mid-America Transplant, and was called upon to provide Video Surveillance, Access Control, and Wired and Wireless network with support/help-desk managed services for the new Family House, which opened in 2022.
We’re honored to be able to play a small role in helping realize the vision of the new Family House; it’s exactly the sort of project we have in mind when we talk about a Passion to Serve, one of Tech’s core values. So, to share a bit more about the story, we’ve invited Paul Nahrgang, Mid-America Transplant’s IT Solutions Manager, for a chat about the Family House and the technologies Tech provided.
To start things off, could you tell us a little bit about Mid-America Transplant’s mission?
Paul: As an organ and tissue procurement organization, our work happens at the intersection of death and life. We help donor families through grief and loss, allowing their loved ones to leave lasting legacies through the gift of life. We serve transplant recipients through the facilitation of safe, reliable donations for transplant. Supported by our core values of compassion, collaboration, excellence, stewardship, innovation, and integrity, we have the honor of saving lives while caring for our donor heroes’ families.
How does the Family House fit into that mission, and what does it mean to you?
Paul: The Family House provides a home away from home. It relieves transplant patients and their families from the worry of finding a place to live while waiting for and recovering from a transplant, allowing them to focus on what really matters—the patient’s health.
Paul Nahrgang
IT Solutions Manager, Mid-America Transplant
The Family House project was deeply meaningful to me. Throughout the project, I heard many stories from those involved on the impact our work has had on their life, friends’ lives, and families’ lives. It was truly a community project. Personally, the little details of the project meant the most to me. For example, ensuring there was sufficient network bandwidth for a child to do homework (or play Xbox) while a parent is recovering from surgery. Or making it possible to setup a home office for remote work for families who have had to uproot their lives to move closer to a transplant center… Details that make things just a little easier on families who are going through some of the toughest moments of their lives.
What were some of the qualities you were looking for in a technology partner for this project?
Paul: The Family House project was complex, and we needed a vendor with a wide range of disciplines to accommodate our unique use-cases for access management, private networks for living spaces, and security. Due to supply chain issues caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, we also needed a vendor that could adapt and have the agility and skill to manage challenges. My experience with Tech has proven that they put the customer and their needs above all else and are willing to adapt to changes, regardless of original Scope of Work or blueprints.
What are some of the specific technology-related challenges you encountered with the new Family House?
Paul: From a technology standpoint, our needs at Family House were somewhat atypical. It isn’t strictly corporate technology, it isn’t strictly hospitality, it isn’t strictly residential. It fell somewhere in the middle. For example, we wanted to ensure that each individual living space had their own private network where families could work, game, share, and collaborate in privacy, separate from our corporate network.
We couldn’t simply broadcast 21 separate SSIDs (wireless network names) for Wi-Fi throughout the building without causing issues with conflicting radio signals or have a shared guest Wi-Fi like you would encounter at a hotel (this, for example, would prevent someone from being able to use their own wireless printer). Tech Electronics engineered a solution that allowed us to broadcast a single SSID throughout the building, with unique passwords for all units, that separate each living space into their own private, local networks.
Additionally, we included community and meeting space at the Family House, designed to allow guests to have a place to gather and also to provide meeting space for Mid-America Transplant. Thus, it required a state-of-the-art audio/visual system that was platform agnostic and user-friendly for all types of scenarios.
What has given you peace of mind regarding the technologies at the Family House going forward?
Paul: The Family House boasts 21 fully furnished single-family apartments. We knew we would need tech support for families staying with us as they bring a wide variety of computers, electronics and other IoT devices, but we didn’t have the capacity to support them all. Tech Electronics designed a custom helpdesk solution for our guests to call when they need help. This supplemental support extends beyond basic tech support and includes the network infrastructure which allows internal Mid-America Transplant IT resources to focus on technology solutions for organ and tissue donation.
It’s been an honor partnering on the Family House, and a pleasure chatting with you here. See you on the next big project?
Paul: I would absolutely be enthusiastic to partner with Tech again. One of Mid-America Transplant’s core values is Innovation. In the technology space we need partners who are willing to take risks, tackle the unknown, and own and support the solutions. That is what Tech does for us.
