Modeling the effect of shorter shelf life of red blood cells on blood supplies

Abstract

In this paper we use simulation to evaluate the effect of shorter red cell shelf life on blood supplies at the Mayo Clinic and compare these results to previous work. Results show that a reduced maximum shelf life of 28 days is supportable under current conditions but that a maximum shelf life of 21 days or less will likely result in unacceptably high outdating rates or unmet patient demand. We also compare the result of discrete event simulation to those of a simple Excel-based simulation and find that the Excel-based simulation predicts a smaller increase in outdating rate in the same scenarios.