Blood inventory display: Emoji style
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The regulations in India mandate the display of available blood units at the blood center as well as in central databases like e-RaktKosh. E-RaktKosh provides a centralized system for blood bank management and allows for checking blood availability by blood type and location. Most of the blood centers display the absolute numbers of the units available. This does not give sufficient information to the people whether these are more, sufficient, or less. The rule of thumb is to maintain a stock inventory equivalent of approximately 4–6 days of average daily use of packed red blood cells and 2 days of average daily use of platelets, based on the average calculated per day using annual consumption.[1] However, this deduction cannot be arrived at just by looking at the stock depicted in numbers. Hence, we came up with a method using emojis that conveys information to the onlooker as to what it means without displaying the actual number, but at the same time drives the message about the sufficiency to the onlooker. The interpretation is shown in Table 1.Table 1: Interpretation of the emojisSteps of preparation of this chart: The daily requirement is calculated by dividing the total consumption of the previous year by 365. This would be the average daily red cell demand (ADRD). The same is done groupwise The daily stock with groupwise availability on a particular day in the inventory is divided by the ADRD to get the Inventory index. The inventory index is the number of days for which the current number of units will suffice. For example, the annual utilization of the O units in the previous year was 9260. ADRD is 9260/365 = 25.4. If the current stock of O is 80, then the Inventory index would be 80/25.2 = 3.2. This means the current stock would suffice for 3 days and would get a smiley of yellow color. Similarly, this would be calculated for other blood groups as well and represented. The same method was used for Fresh Frozen Plasma (FFPs) as wells. For Random Donor platelets (RDPs), the same method is used except that the interpretation is different, as the allowed days as shelf life for RDPs in India is limited to 5 days. The same is shown in Table 1. Representation like this makes the public and other stakeholders understand the implications much better and have an understanding of what to expect from the blood center [Figure 1].Figure 1: Daily Blood Stock represented using emojisWhen the inventory is shown as numbers, the people who come with blood requisitions complain as to why we are not issuing them when we have the requisite units. However with this depiction, they understand whether the stocks are at critical levels or not. We are not aware of any literature on using these emojis previously elsewhere. It is a simple algorithm and can be easily added to or adapted to existing blood inventory software. Author contributions AB, ET prepared the manuscript, Ajay collected the data, PS helped with intellectual content. Financial support and sponsorship Nil. Conflicts of interest There are no conflicts of interest.
Language: English
Subfield: Hematology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7163691739