A Design Science Approach to Blood Donation Apps

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has put additional pressure on the healthcare systems worldwide. It also led to a significant shortage of blood products. Delaying surgeries resulted in an increased demand at peak times that aligned with a decrease in blood donations at the same time. While being crucial for many surgeries and also certain types of treatments, blood cannot be produced artificially, but healthcare systems rely on voluntary donations. The relatively short shelf-life of most products makes a close matching of demand and supply necessary. We argue that smartphone applications can help to motivate donors to donate blood when necessary, giving access to all relevant information and services. By applying the design science research methodology, we derived design principles for effective smartphone applications and present a conceptual model in the form of mock-ups. We performed two design cycles and evaluated the design principles and the conceptual model with regular, lapsed, first-time and non-donors from Germany in a focus group discussion.