A regional blood management system with prescheduled deliveries

The prescheduling of blood deliveries from regional blood centers can improve blood availability at all transfusion services while reducing outdating, delivery costs and inventories maintained at region blood centers. A procedure for determining optimal distribution policies that maintain the highest possible blood availability at transfusion services while holding the achievable outdating level to a small percentage of the total usage is described. The manner in which this plan is being implemented in Long Island, New York, is presented, as well as a discussion of some preliminary results.