Inventory Control Policies for a Hospital Blood Bank: A Simulation and Regression Approach

병원의 혈액 재고관리를 위한 평가 모형 : 시뮬레이션 및 회귀분석 방법

The management of blood inventory is very important within the medical care system. The efficient management of blood supplies and demands for transfusions is of great economic and social importance to both hospitals and patients. For any blood type, there is a complex interaction among the optimal inventory level, daily demand level, daily supply level, transfusion to crossmatch ratio, crossmatch release period, issuing policy and the age of arriving units that determine the shortage and outdate rate. In this paper, we develop an efficient decision rule for blood inventory management in a hospital blood bank which can support efficient hospital blood inventory management using simulation. The primary use of the efficient decision rule will be to establish minimum cost function which consists of inventory levels, period in inventory, outdate and shortage rate for whole blood and various component inventories for a hospital blood bank or a transfusion service. If the administrator compute the mean daily demand for each blood type, the mean daily supply for each blood type, the length of the crossmatch release period and the average transfusion to crossmatch ratio, then it is possible to apply the efficient decision rule to compute the optimal inventory level, inventory period, outdate and shortage rate. This rule can also be used as a decision support system that allows the blood bank administrator to do sensitivity analysis related to controllable blood inventory parameters.