Blood products and their derivatives are perishable commodities that require an efficient inventory management to ensure both a low wastage rate and a high product availability rate. To optimize blood product inventory, Blood Transfusion Services (BTS) need to reduce wastage by avoiding outdates and improving availability of different blood products. We took a blood product lifecycle approach and used advanced visualization techniques to design and develop a highly interactive web-based dashboard to audit retrospective data and consequently, to identify and learn from procedural inefficiencies based on analysis of transactional data. We present pertinent scenarios to show how the blood transfusion staff can use the dashboard to investigate blood product lifecycles so as to probe transition sequence patterns that led to wastage as a means to discover causes of procedural inefficiencies in the BTS.
Blood products and their derivatives are perishable commodities that require an efficient inventory management to ensure both a low wastage rate and a high product availability rate. To optimize blood product inventory, blood transfusion services need to reduce wastage by avoiding outdates and improve availability of different blood products. We used advance visualization techniques to design and develop a highly interactive real-time web-based dashboard to monitor the blood product inventory and the on-going blood unit transactions in near-real-time based on analysis of transactional data. Blood transfusion staff use the dashboard to locate units with specific characteristics, investigate the lifecycle of the units, and efficiently transfer units between facilities to minimize outdates.
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