Responding to COVID-19 disruptions to blood transfusion services: A data analytics and visualization platform for blood product inventory management during COVID-19

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In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an increased concern around shortages of blood products due to impacts on the availability of blood donors; this could seriously affect the operations of hospitals and, in turn, patient safety across Canada. This project takes a data-driven blood product inventory management solution, specifically tailored to respond to blood product supply and distribution challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This project is a partnership between Nova Scotia Health Authority (NSHA) Central Zone Blood Transfusion Services (CZBTS) and Dalhousie University researchers. The project outcome will be an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based blood product inventory management platform to: (1) visualize on an interactive dashboard the near real-time inventory and on-going transactions of blood products to streamline the distribution of essential blood products; (2) predict whether a blood product is likely to be discarded based on its transactional data so that administrators can proactively act to avoid its discard; and (3) prevent the expiration of blood products. The project's impact will be the effective management of blood products so that essential healthcare services can be delivered despite supply disruptions due to COVID-19 pandemic.