Blood collection supply chain management: A critical review and future perspective

Abstract

Blood supply chain is an essential part of modern healthcare system, and an appropriate feeding of blood units and blood products is necessary for several care treatments and surgeries. Any improvement in the management of these chains will guarantee an adequate blood availability to meet the demand and save lives. The applications of operational research and management science techniques enable decision makers to come up with better and more efficient decisions for a wide range of problems in blood transfusion. Various papers on blood collection management, dealing with different problems and constraints, have been proposed in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to integrate the topic in recent research on blood collection management and try to create awareness for a deeper knowledge on blood collection and donation issues. In this paper, we systematically analyze and classify existing studies, addressing various cases, in order to highlight opportunities and to open practical future research directions for operational research and management science about optimization of blood collection.