Progress of quality-associated costing: extension to platelet transfusion practice and the manufacturing scope for...

Realistic estimates about the potential misallocation of health service resources, in relation to the cost-beneficial use of blood products, is enabled by tracing manufacturing costs, through product specification elements to corresponding post-transfusion outcomes. This quality-associated costing (QAC) philosophy is completed in this article by understanding the issues that surround the manufacture of platelets, and by its comparison with the generally used but arbitrary methods for blood product costing. Without QAC, cost-beneficial platelet therapy will not be realized, due to an estimated Western underfunding of approximately one quarter of a billion pounds per annum by arbitrary methods. A reciprocal consequence of such platelet QAC is a significant reduction in the currently perceived cost of source plasma. Western estimates, based upon this, demonstrate that the not-for-profit fractionation of source plasma into purified proteins is probably underfunded by approximately one fifth of a billion pounds per annum through the use of arbitrary costing methods.