Technology has a central role in the world of healthcare. Technological progress can significantly impact the ability to study, identify, or treat diseases and ensure better living standards for people with illnesses. The blood supply chain is heavily influenced by this development. While technology cannot yet synthesize artificial blood, it can help healthcare professionals make its use more efficient, and its collection even more so.
Blood collection is the biggest challenge in ensuring a stable blood supply, which is essential for treating various conditions, especially in emergency and traumatic situations. Earlier this year, the American Red Cross declared a national blood shortage, highlighting a critically low blood supply. Over the last 20 years, the number of people donating blood through the Red Cross has fallen by about 40%. And then there’s the usual unpredictable disruption: in January 2024 alone, winter storms forced the cancellation of over 530 American Red Cross blood drives, resulting in approximately 15,000 uncollected blood and platelet donations. Nearly as many cancellations as in the entire previous year. In this scenario, such events can lead to serious consequences for those in need of emergency blood transfusions.
One thing every blood donor professional knows is that it’s easier to rely on frequent donors to come back and donate again than it is to convince new people to donate blood.
Some of the primary reasons making it difficult to engage new donors are a broad lack of awareness about the importance of blood donation. Low participation rates means very few people are talking about donating blood or referring others, and some common fears and misconceptions about the rules and procedures involved.
Added to this are systemic, long-standing problems in blood centers that make the work of operators more difficult. The pandemic significantly impacted the number of sponsored blood drives and the corresponding staffing levels in blood centers, increasing already high turnover rates in the industry. More broadly, a shortage of trained healthcare workers increases stress and workload for the existing staff, making it harder to maintain, let alone scale, operations. Logistical and infrastructural difficulties also play a big role, for example blood centers rely heavily on IT infrastructure to manage donor data, track blood supplies, ensure compliance with regulations, and communicate with donors to re-engage them. However, many centers struggle with outdated management systems and technical limitations that make each of those jobs more cumbersome and slow down procedures.
With this in mind, at Delcon we started working on a platform that could empower blood center marketing and recruiting teams to do more with their existing resources and capacity. As in many other cases in recent years, generative AI was a critical part of the solution. We developed OpenChair in collaboration with the international venture studio Co-Created. OpenChair leverages data science, machine learning, and generative AI to better understand donor profiles and motivations and create personalized messages designed to capture interest and encourage donors to book another donation appointment.
Data is at the center of the solution – it works by analyzing donor characteristics, grouping them based on demographic, health, and various other data related to their donation experiences, and tailoring outbound communications. With all this information, the system generates personalized messages, refining and adjusting the content based on recipients’ responses, and tracks end to end outcomes. This allows the system to address hyper-specific needs identified from initial or ongoing data, such as preferences for communication via text message or email, availability, and responsiveness to different communication styles. This capability enables blood centers to build a richer database of their donors over time and to better understand and address donor needs, ultimately delivering a better overall donor experience – the primary driver of bringing them back and getting them to refer others.
Several tests with US partners, including Blood Assurance, Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center, Impact Life, and Central California Blood Center, have yielded remarkable results. Communications sent by the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center in Texas using OpenChair saw a 24% increase in appointments among inactive donors and a 35% increase in donations from frequent donors compared to traditional methods used during the same period. This could potentially result in tens of thousands of additional donations annually for each center.
We’ve seen firsthand that data management is foundational to the efficiency of blood centers and a crucial step in achieving the goal of a more consistent blood supply. With OpenChair, we added a crucial component to our ecosystem of solutions, all addressing various steps across the blood center value chain: it starts with donor recruitment and engagement facilitated by OpenChair, followed by blood collection with our advanced Milano blood collection mixer, and blood components manufacturing with the Giotto-Monza device. All solutions are created with an approach that is crucial for anyone wanting to contribute to the development of healthcare practices: putting the daily needs of field operators at the heart of the design process. We experienced this firsthand by designing the Milano scale together with operators from the New York Blood Center. Only in this way can technology truly make a difference.
Barbara Sala
Barbara Sala is the CEO of Delcon, an Italian manufacturing company specializing in the design and production of software and medical devices for the transfusion supply chain. After studying in Italy and the United States, she took over the family business in 2014, bringing a design-driven approach to technological innovation and expanding the business overseas.
