Using simulation to study the impact of racial demographics on blood transfusion allocation policies

Abstract

Managing the supply and demand of blood for transfusions is a complicated problem that many hospitals encounter since the blood supply is dependent on donations while the demand is not. Moreover, recent research also shows that transfusing older blood into patients may lead to increased mortality. This raises the issue of whether transfusing fresher blood can be achieved without jeopardizing blood availability. In this paper, we build a simulation model to study the impact of racial and ethnic diversity in combination with a blood allocation threshold. We show that for many diverse cities like New York City that the increased diversity of the population can lead to a large mismatch between blood supply and demand.