Project 4: Blood Donation Management

• Dr. Geoffrey Chua
• Dr. Fang Liu
• Dr. Lim Wee Kiat
• Mr. Juan Senga

Blood donation surges are often observed immediately after disasters. This results in delays in the relief process due to factors such as lack of staff to collect, test and manage the donated blood, the congested blood transportation systems, and storage overflows at blood banks. For example, after 9/11, according to Kidder (2010), the New York Blood Center was confronted by a donor population of over three times more than the average. This surge in the number of donors resulted in long queues and waiting times of up to 8 hours. Even worse, this overutilization of capacity resulted in delays in the delivery of blood to affected areas.

Sha (2012) finds similar donor surges after the Wenchuan Earthquake in 2010. However, demand for blood turned out to be bi-modal consisting of early demand and late demand. Although the surge provides more than enough fresh blood to cover early demand, around 20% of the donated blood is wasted. This is because the shelf life of red blood cells and fresh blood is 42 days (Kidder, 2010). Hence, a large portion of the blood collected during the early period will eventually be destroyed.

Because the large amount of blood collected in the early period cannot be used to meet the demand at the later period, blood banks need to use their inventory reserves to cover for late demand. This results in a severely reduced reserve level that takes a long time to recover. Kidder (2010) reports that blood centers found that the altruism that compels individuals to donate in times of disaster is generally short-lived. To quote Kidder (2010), “the grand return of the ‘September 11^th donors’, as they have come to be known, never materialized.”

To eliminate donor surges in blood donation, the American Association of Blood Bank has compiled a disaster operation handbook on blood collection in the hopes of reducing or even eliminating the donor surges during and after the disaster relief periods. The guidelines are three-fold. First, there must be information sharing. This means immediate blood requirements and the amount of blood collected per center should be shared. Second, demand must be updated, such that a task force continuously monitors the situation and notifies the local media once they observe a change in blood needs. Third, roles and responsibilities must be defined with a chain of command.

This project aims to first find the centralized solution that solves the donor surge problem as a benchmark. The team will then analyze if the handbook guidelines above are sufficient to eliminate the donor surges. If not, we shall propose additional practices to be added to the guidelines. To this end, we will aim to find the optimal policy for blood collection with continuously updated demands. For the more realistic decentralized system, we will design a set of mechanisms that can coordinate the parties involved to achieve the centralized benchmark solution. Finally, we will explore when and how these mechanisms can be implemented in practice.