Study on the centralization strategy of the blood allocation among different departments within a hospital

This paper mainly studies on how to distribute the blood items among different departments within a hospital. The improper allocation of blood in hospital at present could cause severe shortage and wastage of blood resource, which may endanger patient's lives and impose considerable costs on hospital. In order to solve this problem, we investigate the novel allocation method by centralizing the blood inventory of some departments. This paper illustrates the centralization principle in hospital, and formulates the integer programming model to work out the optimal allocation network scheme and the optimal inventory setting for every department. The results of the numerical example demonstrate that this centralization method could considerably reduce blood shortage and wastage in hospital by about 80% and 28% respectively. Furthermore, it could decrease the total cost by about 5000 Yuan in the hospital and improve the effect of some certain surgeries by transfusing the fresh blood to patients.