Regional
Optimising the selection of blood donation request recipients
Ai Harayama
The Japanese Red Cross Nagano Blood Center Nagano, Japan
Shinichi Ametani
The Japanese Red Cross Nagano Blood Center Nagano, Japan
Evidence-based decision-making has become indispensable across many sectors, including blood services in Japan. In a constantly changing environment, securing a stable pool of blood donors requires strategic planning and implementation grounded in data analysis.
At the Japanese Red Cross Nagano Blood Center, blood collections take place both at fixed-site donation rooms and through mobile drives at companies and public venues. Donor recruitment typically involves contacting previous donors from the same venue or nearby areas via postcards or email.
Donor selection is conducted using a dedicated system that allows staff to search donor records based on criteria such as previous donation history and residential area. However, the criteria employed at our center have become standardized and do not adequately reflect the specific characteristics of each venue.
Two key issues are evident:
- A lack of data utilization prevents a clear understanding of donation performance at each venue
- The number of donors required to achieve collection targets cannot be estimated, making it difficult to set venue-specific targets.
As a result, potential donors who might have responded positively to a request were likely being overlooked.
As a result, potential donors who might have responded positively to a request were likely being overlooked.
To address these challenges, we introduced Power BI, a business intelligence (BI) tool developed by Microsoft. BI refers to technologies that visualize and analyze accumulated data to support decision-making. Power BI facilitates these capabilities through interactive dashboards and robust data modeling.
Using Power BI, we created dashboards to visualize data for each donation venue. Key datasets were collected, including donor counts by date, achievement rates of collection targets, past donor recruitment response rates, and donor residence data.
We used Power Query to clean and structure the data before visualizing it in Power BI dashboards with graphs and tables.
The dashboards provided clearer insights into venue-specific donation trends and enabled staff to define more appropriate recipient selection criteria.
By analyzing past achievement rates and response trends, staff could estimate the number of positive responses needed to reach a target and then calculate the required number of requests (Figure 1). Geographical mapping of donor residences further identified promising recruitment zones, reducing reliance on staff familiarity with local geography and minimizing bias (Figure 2). A practical example illustrates the benefits. At Venue A, recruitment previously targeted only donors living in the host city. Analysis using Power BI showed that in previous donations many donors came from surrounding municipalities. Comparing three donation events before and after implementation, the number of requests increased from 878 to 1,238, and the number of positive responses rose from 53 to 102 (Figure 3).
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
The implementation of Power BI resulted in substantial improvements. Data processing time was reduced from about one hour per venue to a single 30-minute session per month for all venues combined. Visualization made it easier to interpret complex collection trends. Most importantly, staff could set evidence-based donor recruitment goals, replacing intuition-driven decision-making with data-driven strategies.
Although BI tools are traditionally used in corporate contexts, our experience demonstrates their effectiveness for supporting donor recruitment strategies in blood services. Data analysis and visualization are essential for evidence-based operational decisions, and BI tools like Power BI are highly effective in this regard. Our goal is to utilize existing data efficiently to improve the effectiveness of donor recruitment, thereby contributing to a stable and safe blood supply. Given Power BI’s versatility, we plan to expand its use in other areas of blood service operations.
While the tool has significantly improved operational efficiency, further refinement is needed. Moving forward, we aim to enhance our data analysis capabilities to enable more precise and targeted outreach based on increasingly detailed data.
