Speaker: Robert Tibshirani

Abstract: Every day Stanford hospital (SHC) orders some number of units of platelets from the Stanford Blood Center (SBC). Although SBC collects these units daily from donors, the units are held in testing for first 2 days, after which they can be released and can only be used for the next 3 days, before they expire. Currently the number of units ordered by SHC is based on historical daily averages. While there is rarely a shortage, many units are wasted over the year. Using information that is available about the patients and planned procedures in the hospital, we have constructed a supervised learning model and an ordering scheme that on backtesting reduces the number of units wasted by two-thirds without any shortages. This will potentially allow for optimized SBC donor collection strategy and SHC ordering strategy to drastically reduce the cost of wastage without compromising patient care.