Appropriate Inventory Managment (AIM)

AIM Resources:

News Releases:

  1. Blood Management System Pilot Begins to Help Hospitals Track and Improve Patient Outcomes

  2. Blood Management System Designed to Improve Patient Outcomes and Offer Savings to U.S. Hospitals Unveiled

 Blood Center and Hospital Contact: Kellie Kerr

AIM in the News:

Wall Street Journal Radio Podcast Interview  feat. America's Blood Centers' CEO Jim MacPherson (1 min. Audio File 2/21/11)

Wall Street Journal Radio Podcast Interview feat. Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth's Medical Director Dr. Patricia Fenderson (4 min. Audio File 1/22/11)

Healthcare Informatics

Healthcare IT News

Dotmed

Health News Digest

Media Contact: Mack Benton

AIM FAQs:

  1. What is AIM?
  2. What are the benefits of AIM?
  3. How can the software be obtained? How much does it cost?
  4. Is training offered?
  5. What results have countries seen with similar systems?

What is AIM?

Appropriate Inventory Management (AIM) provides blood centers a tool to assist hospitals and physicians to better manage and use the available blood supply. It is hospital blood utilization and patient outcome analysis software that lowers the risk of transfusion complications, the cost of blood transfusions and increases the local blood supply.

 
The software consists of two modules:
 
  • Module 1 offers automated data on blood product availability, allocated inventory, and wastage, as well as transfusion aggregate data. It identifies how many days’ worth of inventory are needed based upon annualized patient transfusion needs, hospital size, clinical services offered, distance from blood provider, storage capacities, and blood product needs for disaster planning.
 
  • Module 2 enables blood centers and their hospital clients to access automated data reports on utilization and patient outcomes stratified by blood product, indication, and patient population. 

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What are the benefits of AIM?

AIM tracks blood inventory through utilization and provides patient outcome analyses for the hospital's identification and monitoring of Key Performance Indicators. Blood centers and their client hospital users have access to more than 180 reports and dashboards.

AIM promotes accreditation compliance, reduces wastage experiences and blood product transfusions with the use of national benchmarking reports, assists with improving the efficiency and efficacy of patient care while reducing blood related cost by 15% or more.  Users are able to evaluate their patient population by demographics and diagnosis groups to determine the percentage occurrence of transfusions for nine distinct product groups. 
 

How can the software be obtained?

AIM software is exclusively available to all members of America’s Blood Centers. Each member blood center has the option of incurring the costs for the software or sharing a portion of the costs with client hospitals.
 

 Is software training offered?

Training is provided for participating blood centers and transfusion services. Additional resources include both an implementation plan and users guide.
 

What results have other countries seen with similar systems?

AIM is the first system of its kind in the U.S. In eight years of using an AIM-like benchmarking system, the United Kingdom experienced a decrease of more than 16 percent in the quantity of RBCs distributed, a reduction in wastage of 45 percent, and the distribution of RBCs on average five days fresher than previously.
 
RBC use in the U.S. is 48 per 1,000 population, a number similar to that of the UK in 2000. Today, blood use in England is 40 per 1,000 – a 17 percent reduction, much of which is attributed to the use of the benchmarking system. A similar reduction in the U.S. could save hospitals nearly $830 million combined annually or $640,000 or more per year for the average large hospital (300+ beds) and, more importantly, save hundreds of thousands of patients needless exposure to blood transfusion.
 
Module 2, based on the Optimal Blood Use program developed by the Finnish Red Cross, which resulted in significantly reducing the difference between the highest and lowest RBC usage among hospitals within four years of implementation.