As you might know, WMDA is striving to have more and high quality data and insight available to inform effective and efficient patient/donor matching. In August, a letter has been sent out to inform you about the change to move to a new Extensible Markup Language (XML) file format.

Not all organisations are ready to go to the XML format and asked us to delay the transition to the first quarter of 2018.

The infrastructure of accepting and validating files is nearly ready. At the moment, we are working on performance and penetration tests of the system. This is important in order to ensure the security and authenticity of all the data. However, the testing period requires more time than initially anticipated.

Based on these observations, the decision has been taken to extend the transition date to move to XML for data submission to April 1, 2018.

Find below the revised timelines in order to migrate from the old data format to the new (XML) data format.

Key date

Activities

July 31, 2017  -

January 15, 2018

  • Information, support and guidance to organisations to help transition to the new file format and submission process.
  • Organisations send test XML files via the data upload service and will receive validation results and feedback. If your organisation would like to upload a test file, an e-mail can be sent to support@bmdw.org for details.

January 15  -

February 15, 2018

  • Pilot test phase: NMDP, ZKRD, Anthony Nolan and other selected organisations (previously sent high quality test file) submit data via the new XML file and conduct end-to-end testing to confirm that the new data submission infrastructure is functioning properly.

 

NOTE: All organisations should continue to send DOT20 files via the current data submission method to update their data the production database

March 1 - April 1, 2018

  • After a successful pilot, WMDA starts accepting XML files into production from the approved pilot organisations. 
  • WMDA will schedule a date with your organisation to move to the new file format.

April 1 - June 1, 2018

  • All organisations to be migrated to the new platform. After June 1, BMDW will no longer accepts data submissions via DOT20 format. BMDW only accepts XML files.

Annually

  • The XML file format (XSD files) will be reviewed and adjusted, based on feedback and scientific developments.

We published the revised timelines for transition to XML file data submission to BMDW here. We also sent this information by email to the CEOs of all listing organisations and by email to the people who are responsible for the data submission of the DOT20 files and all test users. You can also take a look at a copy of the letter here.

If you are involved in the data submission to BMDW for your organisation, please make sure that you take notice of this information. If you haven't started to implement the changes to create an XML file in your organisation, please start scheduling the development as soon as possible.

On November 9th, you can also meet the team at the WMDA Fall meeting in Minneapolis. They are available from 09:00 AM till 11:00 AM in Director’s Row 3 in the Hilton Hotel for answering any questions.