A novel capacity sharing mechanism to collaborative activities in the blood collection process during the COVID-19 outbreak

Abstract

Because of government intervention, such as quarantine and cancellation of public events at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak and donors’ health scare of exposure to the virus in medical centers, the number of blood donors has considerably decreased. In some countries, the rate of blood donation has reached lower than 30%. Accordingly, in this study, to fill the lack of blood product during COVID-19, especially at the outbreak’s peak, we propose a novel mechanism by providing a two-stage optimization tool for coordinating activities to mitigate the shortage in this urgent situation. In the first stage, a blood collection plan considering disruption risk in supply to minimize the unmet demand will be solved. Afterward, in the second stage, the collected units will be shared between regions by applying the capacity sharing concept to avoid the blood shortage in health centers. Moreover, to tackle the uncertainty and disruption risk, a novel stochastic model combining the mixed uncertainty approach is tailored. A rolling horizon planning method is implemented under an iterative procedure to provide and share the limited blood resources to solve the proposed model A real-world case study of Iran is investigated to examine the applicability and performance of the proposed model; it should be noted that the designed mechanism is not confined just to this case. Obtained computational results indicate the applicability of the model, the superior performance of the capacity sharing concept, and the effectiveness of the designed mechanism for mitigating the shortage and wastage during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Blood supply chain network design: a systematic review of literature and implications for future research

“…It has also been observed that there are many studies devoted solely to the distribution of the platelets product. Besides, some studies follow the strategy of collecting blood products directly by apheresis (Ghatreh Samani et al , 2020; Ghatreh Samani and Hosseini-Motlagh, 2021a; Haeri et al , 2020; Hosseini-Motlagh et al , 2020a; Jemai and Sarkar, 2019; Jin et al , 2021; Larimi and Yaghoubi, 2019; Moslemi and Pasandideh, 2021; Osorio et al , 2018b). Apheresis is used to draw out only the needed components (platelets and red blood cells).…”

“…Moreover, BSC network design models based on disaster conditions are developed by the researchers. Some of these studies addressed earthquakes (Farrokhizadeh et al , 2021; Hosseini-Motlagh et al , 2020d; Seyfi-Shishavan et al , 2021) and COVID-19 pandemic (Ghatreh Samani and Hosseini-Motlagh, 2021a; Shirazi et al , 2021). However, sustainable and green BSC network models have received little attention (only five studies).…”

Bi-level programming for emergency blood transshipment-allocation considering substitution against public health events

“…[23] studied the problem of the blood supply chain with uncertain supply and demand during an epidemic. [37] proposed a two-stage optimization tool to coordinate the activities of the blood supply chain during an epidemic outbreak and designed a novel stochastic model incorporating a mixed uncertainty approach. In contrast to the above-mentioned results, this paper considers the hierarchical structure of the emergency blood transshipment-allocation network using two-level programming, where some characteristics of public health emergencies are taken into account.…”

Resilient and social health service network design to reduce the effect of COVID-19 outbreak

“…Limited healthcare facilities, daily increase in cases, and patients in an emergency (such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease) place the medical centers under added pressure during the outbreak of pandemic diseases such as COVID-19 (Samani & Hosseini-Motlagh, 2021 ). Also, the issue of preventing infectious disease transmission from infected people to healthy people is of great importance in healthcare systems.…”