Social networking and organ donation: A connection to save lives

on May 03, 2012 at 7:30 AM
mark-likes-beast.jpgMark Zuckerberg and his Facebook page
First off, kudos to Mark Zuckerberg!

The potential of social networking for improving lives, indeed, for saving lives, has yet to be fully appreciated until this moment. With the creation of Organ Donor, Facebook raises the visibility of the issue and provides a way to encourage organ donation.
Facebook users can register as an organ donor through the website and share their intentions with family and friends.

The announcement is generating a lot of techie “buzz” but it’s also being celebrated on organ transplant websites and recognized, prominently, in print and on highly visible blogs such as the Huffington Post where Zuckerberg appears in a video, appealing for attention to this vital issue. The announcement itself garners attention; it remains to be seen, of course, how effective the effort will be. With more than 114,000 people waiting for a heart, kidney or liver transplant in the United States and millions of others worldwide, all eyes are on this.

Telling others, via Facebook, that you are indeed willing to be an organ donor may go a long way toward encouraging people to sign up. Most people are not opposed; they simply don’t exercise the option and opt in to do it.

Zuckerberg indicated that the motivation to start the project came from his friendship with the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2011.

But, curiously, some years back when Jobs had a liver transplant and, as a result of his high profile, the subject of access to organs received considerable attention, it sparked the interest of behavioral economist, Richard Thaler, and, in a column in 2009, Opting In Vs. Opting Out,” he reviewed several plans and approaches to generate higher levels of voluntary participation and basically concluded that the major challenge is to make signing-up easy. 'Why not’, he asked, 'create a Web site with a safe and secure simple sign-up procedure?' "Social networking sites like Facebook could also help, by encouraging signup campaigns:"

Here is a challenge to Mr. Jobs: Why not create a Web site—and a free app for the iPhone—that lets people sign up as organ donors in their home states? Signing up to be an organ donor should be at least as easy as downloading a song to your iPhone.”

It took Zuckerberg, though, to do just that.

medium_images.jpegOrgans in the body that can be donated and transplanted
The organ donor feature lets Facebook users share their experience and personal stories with their friends on their “timeline.” They can share the reasons why they opted to become an organ donor and how they did it. If any user on Facebook wants to donate his/her organ(s) to save a life, Facebook provides a way to sign up for the donor's state or national organ donor registry.

The new organ donor status feature is now available in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the U.S., Facebook has upwards of 160,000,000 users with an additional 30,000,000 in Great Britain. Facebook intends to add other countries in the coming months. The total number of Facebook users is about 900,000,000 worldwide.

The potential, clearly, is enormous.

I’ve tried to encourage policy change to improve the availability of organs by shifting from an opting in to an opting out, and, of course, others have as well, including differing methods to both encourage and to limit access to those not willing to donate (e.g. Israel). Still, the list of those needing organs has grown.

Most people support organ donation and organ transplants, as noted, but, they don't donate. Given the former, how do we encourage the latter? How does (or can) society encourage positive behavior? How do we try to steer people toward good choices?

Zuckerberg may well have hit on a way. We'll see whether the man who made a fortune on the idea that people want to share everything is right in thinking that everything might also include organs.