TRUISM (TRANSFUSION INVENTORY PROCESS MINING FRAMEWORK): A PROCESS MINING-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING BLOOD TRANSFUSION PRODUCT INVENTORIES

Abstract

Transfusion product inventories are a vital part of modern health care delivery as they bridge supply and demand to deliver a quality blood product in a timely manner. Blood products are also costly, scarce, and there are also ethical considerations. The management of these blood product resources is becoming more complex, especially in the context of an increasingly diverse product menu, and in an environment where cost and efficiency pressures are becoming more prevalent. To meaningfully manage and understand real blood product inventories, the transfusion community has relied upon a value-based perspective to understand their functioning, using key performance indicators such as inventory size and wastage rates. These methodologies are limited in their ability to fully describe inventory performance. Although other tools, such as modelling and simulation have been used, they can only represent a real inventory in an idealized state and are used theoretically but not for day-to-day description of an inventory. Although papers in the past decade have alluded to blood product inventories as processes, and although inventories possess the basic attributes of a process, the conventional transfusion inventory management paradigm has not evaluated them with process-based methodologies. Therefore, to fully evaluate the inventory, the complementary use of process-based tools and value-based tools should occur. This research describes the creation of the TRansfUsion Inventory proceSs Mining (TRUISM) Framework which is a generalizable approach applicable to transfusion service inventory data for the purpose of generating valid process mining results. The research describes the subsequent knowledge translation of the process mining methodology for two case studies on red cell unit wastage and automated blood fridge usage. The results of these case studies demonstrate that further valuable process-based insight and guidelines for process improvement can be generated using a process-centric view to complement the conventional value-centric one. This may allow global transfusion inventory managers to gain further insight into their practices and potentially improve inventory performance.