Using Interactive Visual Analytics to Optimize Blood Products Inventory at a Blood Bank

Abstract

Blood products and their derivatives are perishable commodities that require an efficient inventory management to ensure both a low wastage rate and a high product availability rate. To optimize blood product inventory, Blood Transfusion Services (BTS) need to reduce wastage by avoiding outdates and improving availability of different blood products. We took a blood product lifecycle approach and used advanced visualization techniques to design and develop a highly interactive web-based dashboard to audit retrospective data and consequently, to identify and learn from procedural inefficiencies based on analysis of transactional data. We present pertinent scenarios to show how the blood transfusion staff can use the dashboard to investigate blood product lifecycles so as to probe transition sequence patterns that led to wastage as a means to discover causes of procedural inefficiencies in the BTS.