Quality pays--in every business!

For the past few years, blood banks within and outside of hospitals have been required to develop a documented quality assurance/quality improvement program to comply with regulator guidelines and accreditation standards. Concerns have been raised that the cost of compliance could exceed any plausible return on this investment. Unfortunately, little data exist in blood bank literature or are currently being captured to support or refute this contention. This article describes an approach for capturing the cost of quality based on models from the manufacturing industry, suggests how blood banks could document the cost and benefit of their quality efforts and presents some unpublished data on the impact of tracking the cost of poor quality in one blood bank.