Improving Blood Bank Inventory Management Using Double Cross-match and Hybrid Issuance Policy

Blood availability in hospitals is of high humanitarian importance, thus blood shortage is not desired at all. High wastage rate of blood in hospitals is an important issue, which becomes more important as the standards of health care services becomes higher. In order to address blood shortage and wastage issues in a hospital, this paper develops a new inventory management model as a decision making tool to help making tactical and operational level decisions for a Hospital Blood Bank (HBB) inventory management. These decisions include issuance and ordering policy and the aim of the model is to reduce blood wastage and shortage. For this purpose, a multi period, multi-product inventory problem is proposed that performs double cross-match of blood units, with a newly developed issuance policy for an HBB. Using the cross-match ratio, it determines core demand of each patient, as well as reserve demand. Then, an assignment problem is solved to determine patients whose reserve demands are shared. Once the decisions are made on the assignment of shared reserve at the end of each period, blood units are assigned to the patients and the inventory status is updated (as it deals with aging products, in a multi period setting), using the new hybrid issuance policy. An illustrative numerical example is developed to describe the mechanism of the proposed model. Since using younger blood units is preferred for quality of care purposes, the proposed issuance policy also helps improving the quality of care.