Building a Better Blood Support Strategy for Patients with Sickle Cell Disease

Providing antigen-aligned red blood cells for patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) is one of the most important—and most complex—responsibilities the blood community faces today. Success depends on a variety of operational systems that can respond quickly and reliably to patient needs.

Many blood collection facilities have strengthened pieces of this continuum, such as targeted donor recruitment and hospital partnerships. Vitalant’s SCD initiative aims to go further, aligning recruitment, hospital engagement, inventory management and clinical support – including access to advanced cell and gene therapies – across a national system to improve care for patients with SCD.

At Vitalant, this work began with two practical tools: an initiative charter and an end-to-end dashboard.

The Charter

The charter is the foundation. It defines the initiative’s purpose, scope, governance, workstreams, roles and deliverables. It also clarifies who should be involved, how decisions will be made and what success looks like. In practice, this means bringing together stakeholders from donor recruitment, collections, donor testing, reference laboratories, inventory management, data analysis, hospital services, biotherapies, medical leadership and community engagement.

A strong charter also prevents a common cross-functional problem – unclear ownership. Improving antigen-aligned support is not the job of a single department. Marketing and recruitment increase the pool of diverse and antigen-typed donors; collections affect product yield; testing teams support typing and compatibility; inventory teams manage availability and substitutions; hospital-facing teams coordinate planned needs; and medical leadership aligns clinical priorities with patient safety.

The Dashboard

The dashboard turns the charter into action. It translates goals into measurable indicators that can be tracked, reviewed and used to guide interventions. The most useful dashboards follow the full path from donor strategy to patient support rather than focusing on a single point in the system.

That end-to-end view matters because problems with SCD support are rarely isolated. A low fill rate may reflect limited inventory, but it may also stem from a lack of trust in the community, insufficient advance notice, recruitment gaps, poor donor retention, higher deferral rates or manufacturing constraints. A dashboard helps teams see where the system is working, where gaps need attention and which actions are most likely to improve outcomes.

For many blood centers, the best first step is a minimum viable dashboard: a small set of high-value measures that are clearly defined, available from existing data and meaningful to operational teams. As data quality improves and definitions are standardized, the dashboard can expand.

A blood center might start by tracking donors who are more likely to support patients with SCD, including donors from racially and ethnically diverse populations or donors whose red cells are negative for C, E and K antigens. Other useful measures include fill rate for selected antigen-aligned orders, time to fill and substitution frequency. Additional metrics may include donor retention, deferral patterns, product availability by phenotype, chronic transfusion notice time and regional inventory readiness. The point is not simply to report data, but to use it to strengthen community engagement, hospital partnerships and operational readiness.

A charter provides structure, and a dashboard provides visibility. Together, they give blood collection facilities a practical framework for aligning stakeholders, measuring progress and moving from activity to impact. As blood centers expand their role in supporting patients with SCD, the need for coordinated, data-driven and equitable approaches will continue to grow.

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About the Authors

Rim Abdallah, MD, is medical director at Vitalant; Becky Cap, MBA, is senior vice president of biotherapies at Vitalant; May Dobbins is senior corporate director of belonging and HR transformation at Vitalant.