Field Notes: Insights about Blood Donation

It’s our job to understand the disruptive trends that we are seeing in the market and help our clients and partners spot opportunities for growth. As part of our “Field Notes” series, our partners share what they heard at key industry events.?

This week, Daniel Shani, attended the ADRP: The Association for Blood Donor Professionals annual conference with our client, Delcon, to share more about our collaboration and to help increase engagement with blood centers.

Here are some of the challenges the industry is facing and some forward-looking solutions that are driving progress:

1. As you’d expect – when a patient with medical bleeding or severe trauma is in transit to the hospital, every second counts. Life saving blood transfusions are given at the hospital, and travel time delay with EMS often has dire consequences for patients. Some leading organizations are collaborating to test making blood available on EMS vehicles (ambulances and helicopters) and are already demonstrating impactful results.
2. There is a big imbalance in the diversity of the US donor pool. Over 70% of donations come from caucasian males. As little as 2% of donations come from African American donors. The diversity of the donor pool is super important for a variety of reasons, but especially for conditions like sickle cell disease, primarily affecting African Americans, where the donor’s genetic likeness to the recipient is critical for effective transfusion. Alayna Maxson and her team at Solvita are pushing boundaries and seeing results, nearly doubling their participation by African American donors in a 2 year timeframe. They followed a rigorous social science research framework to really understand their audience, and translated their findings into direct community engagement, debunking of common misconceptions and perceived risks, and tailoring of incentives and operating hours to best meet the community’s needs.
3. Lots of prospective donors drop off during the online booking process and there are lots of innovations around finding ways to make it more convenient for blood donors to get the information they need, including the use of new technology and AI. As estimated 35-40% of donors that begin the appointment booking process, drop off before confirming an appointment. That represents a huge amount of effort and resource to engage a donor that does not ultimately convert into a much-needed donation to maintain blood supply levels. New solutions range from AI chat bots to white glove service concepts, aimed at delivering a better donor experience and presenting the right information at the right time, all while reducing the level of effort and input needed by short-staffed blood center teams.
4. ?Bonus? New line we heard and loved: What’s the rock in your shoe??We often ask about problems keeping people up at night. This is a different flavor that really effectively gets at a wider range of day to day issues – constraints slowing down your team, blocking step function improvement, or sapping people’s motivation.??

If you need help solving a complex problem, building a new solution, or unlocking new ideas for good growth, reach out to the team.