Assistant Professor Johns Hopkins Medicine Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Background/Case Studies: Platelets are a limited resource with a short shelf life. Hospitals within the same region, using the same blood supplier may compete for platelets to maintain sufficient inventory, leading to expiration. The aim of this study was to reduce overall wastage of platelets among participating hospitals.
Study
Design/Methods: The pilot study consisted of a 41-day period starting in March 2025. Each participating hospital within a health system nominated a representative to an inter-hospital team. Team members were sent a daily survey using Qualtrics software (Qualtrics, Provo, UT) to report inventory, anticipated outdate of inventory, and standing/ad-hoc platelet orders. Standing orders were defined as orders placed at pre-set intervals and ad-hocorders were defined as orders that were placed as needed. Data were shared with all participants for complete transparency. Baseline utilization and wastage data were exported from the blood bank laboratory information systems during the 6-month period prior to the intervention.
Data were analyzed using Microsoft Excel and Pandas, NumPy, and Plotly Python libraries. Shapiro-Wilk and paired t-tests were used for statistical analysis. Projected cost savings were calculated by applying the wastage rate during the intervention period to the pre-intervention data and reporting the difference.
Results/Findings: Daily response rate ranged from 61% to 93%. Baseline platelet outdate percentage, calculated as an average of the 6-month period prior to the intervention, ranged from 0.1% to 47.2% of each hospital's platelet inventory, totaling 4.8% of products wasted due to outdate overall.
After establishing a system of inter-hospital transparency of ordering, stored inventory, and usage data, wastage decreased from an average rate of 4.8% during the 6-month baseline period to 3.4% after initiating bi-weekly meetings and full transparencyintervention (p = 0.40) and is shown in Figure 1. Hospitals also used these data to engage in inter-hospital trade and/or transfer of units, consisting of 20% of all ad-hoc platelet transactions, representing the exchange of over $39,000worth of products.
Conclusions: Establishing a voluntary system of inter-hospital inventory transparency was associated with two related findings. Firstly, there was a reduction in platelet wastage due to outdating of platelets. While this decrease does not meet statistical significance, it represents a projected $200,000 annual savings across the institutions. Secondly, there was an unanticipated savings associated with the inter-hospital exchange of products. This exchangesaves the receiving hospitals from the purchase of additional inventory, while decreasing the wastage of the source hospitals.Future steps include the automation of hospital inventory and transactional data, development of a dashboard – viewable by all parties, and machine learning optimization of transactions.
