Blood Donors and the Supply of Blood and Blood Products (1996) / Chapter Skim
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III Enhancing Distribution
III Enhancing Distribution
Pages 51-80
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From page 51... ...
III Enhancing Distribution 51
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From page 53... ...
One of the things I have been doing this past year is to take a good system, and I believe it is a good system, remove some of the inefficiencies, and then create greater efficiency in what remains. Before I describe that, however, I would like to go over some of our very basic trends to give you a sense of our supply and demand situation with the Red Cross.
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From page 54... ...
Louis Hub is to ensure the balance of supply and demand within the ARC as a whole, and to be a single coordinating point for transactions with non-Red Cross blood centers and hospitals. We have restock programs whereby importing ARC centers automatically receive blood products when their inventory levels reach a predetermined threshold.
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From page 55... ...
I would like some of our non-Red Cross friends out there to know that we sell blood cheaper to you than we do to our own partners within the Red Cross system. What we are doing now is standardizing the price.
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From page 56... ...
We are trying to manage our own resources so that when there is a demand from outside the Red Cross system, then the Hub makes the call. For example, the Hub calls United Blood Services,
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From page 57... ...
This is the thinking for now, but I see other possible alternatives that may be more effective and strategic to the Red Cross in meeting our customers' demands.
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From page 59... ...
we couldn't see the economic sense in the double transportation in this age of computers. We do have a central computer system for United Blood Services, so that we control inventory from a single coordinating position in Scottsdale, Arizona, but we don't physically move the blood into Scottsdale.
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From page 60... ...
We utilize it very extensively, both when we have needs that somehow we can't fill and also when we have surpluses that we want to share with the rest of the country. There is a little controversy with this system, however, because the AABB will ship a unit, for example, from United Blood Services to a hospital in Boston that is presumably supplied by the American Red Cross or a hospital in New York that is presumably supplied by New York Blood Center.
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From page 61... ...
One of the interesting points that we can make from United Blood Services concerns our program in New Mexico. The state has the highest ethnic minority population in the country 50 percent Hispanic American and Native American population.
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From page 62... ...
In Albuquerque you would anticipate having an adequate supply, but our friends in Memphis, Tennessee, have blood drives in only a small percentage of the referral area of the hospitals in Memphis. The same is true in Chicago, where both United Blood Services and Life Source are largely limited to the Chicago metropolitan area, although patient referrals may come from southeastern Wisconsin, central Illinois, and so forth.
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From page 63... ...
There will be pressures to move blood from lower-cost areas into higher-cost areas, as well as perhaps more medically defensible requirements or pressures to move blood from lower viral marker areas in rural areas and also to begin to match up the rural areas with the tertiary care areas as well. I think we have a start in this with several national plans, but it would be highly desirable to bring them all together and have full-scale cooperation.
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From page 64... ...
I am delighted to hear that the Red Cross is thinking of changing the nature of the Hub in some areas. We may be able to cooperate more openly and filly.
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From page 65... ...
. We are a single blood center system, but really comprise a total of five blood centers, one very large center in Oklahoma City and four smaller centers, each about a hundred miles away, that do everything that we do at the main center except laboratory processing.
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From page 66... ...
Basically, most of this was on a contract basis with other regional blood centers or in some cases hospitals. Our purpose was to do this with other regional blood centers.
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From page 67... ...
Hospitals that are dissatisfied with the regional blood center initiate a call to OBI for ad hoc or contract blood products. We do work with regional blood centers, and we are dealing with some hospitals directly, although we prefer not to.
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From page 68... ...
We have become known as a blood center that has an excess of all types of products available, from single donor products to whole blood-derived products. QUESTIONS/COMMENTS Robert Travis: Does your no-outdate policy also apply to apheresis products?
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From page 69... ...
Even though in-house usage may fluctuate, our draw is very steady for the whole year. We plan to draw extra, for example, during holiday times because we know that there are other places in the county that will want blood products.
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From page 71... ...
In this day of computerization, one would think that in many centers the hospital inventories could be monitored on a periodic basis with an electronic process that allows data to be fed into the regional blood center for assessment of regional inventory. In fact, such a system could facilitate estimation of the national inventories and resource sharing.
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From page 72... ...
Unfortunately, by virtue of its perishable nature, blood has a limited life span that affects its availability. There has been work done largely out of the New York Blood Center addressing inventory modeling based upon evaluation of wastage versus shortage of blood products.
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From page 73... ...
From the perspective of a transfusion service, the blood centers which could be helpful are often underinvolved in helping to set transfusion service blood inventory levels. If the director of a transfusion service wants to be safe and avoid any blood shortages, he can just stockpile enough blood to be sure he will never run out.
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From page 74... ...
From the perspective of the transfusion service, I don't want to call various hospitals or regional blood centers when I need support. I want one number to call and I want the blood in 20 minutes.
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From page 75... ...
When I go to the supermarket to buy milk, I consciously look for the milk with the longest shelf life. You wonder what happens in the transfusion services when staff members are ordering blood from the blood center.
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From page 77... ...
We buy and ship over one billion pounds of perishable product annually, and that perishable product has a shelf life from 3 days up to about 45 days for cheese and processed products. Thus, we have a tremendous jigsaw puzzle that we are putting together every day.
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From page 78... ...
Until recently, what we were doing was a little bit like the Red Cross scenario. We had a hub, which was at our Greensburg Seafood Distribution Plant.
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From page 79... ...
There is a lot of money saved on that, and we have added four days of shelf life to our product where it needs to be, right there in front of the consumer. In turn, we are going, to reduce our waste.
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From page 80... ...
That is correct. The Kroger Company is going to continue to negotiate cost and product specifications, but Emery is going to turn into more or less an order placer, which will take the orders from my stores and distribute them out to different suppliers.
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