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On the improvement of blood sample collection at clinical laboratories

BACKGROUND: Blood samples are usually collected daily from different collection points, such hospitals and health centers, and transported to a core laboratory for testing. This paper presents a project to improve the collection routes of two of the largest clinical laboratories in Spain. These rout...

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Autores principales: Grasas, Alex, Ramalhinho, Helena, Pessoa, Luciana S, Resende, Mauricio GC, Caballé, Imma, Barba, Nuria
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3933262/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24406140
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-14-12
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author Grasas, Alex
Ramalhinho, Helena
Pessoa, Luciana S
Resende, Mauricio GC
Caballé, Imma
Barba, Nuria
author_facet Grasas, Alex
Ramalhinho, Helena
Pessoa, Luciana S
Resende, Mauricio GC
Caballé, Imma
Barba, Nuria
author_sort Grasas, Alex
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Blood samples are usually collected daily from different collection points, such hospitals and health centers, and transported to a core laboratory for testing. This paper presents a project to improve the collection routes of two of the largest clinical laboratories in Spain. These routes must be designed in a cost-efficient manner while satisfying two important constraints: (i) two-hour time windows between collection and delivery, and (ii) vehicle capacity. METHODS: A heuristic method based on a genetic algorithm has been designed to solve the problem of blood sample collection. The user enters the following information for each collection point: postal address, average collecting time, and average demand (in thermal containers). After implementing the algorithm using C programming, this is run and, in few seconds, it obtains optimal (or near-optimal) collection routes that specify the collection sequence for each vehicle. Different scenarios using various types of vehicles have been considered. Unless new collection points are added or problem parameters are changed substantially, routes need to be designed only once. RESULTS: The two laboratories in this study previously planned routes manually for 43 and 74 collection points, respectively. These routes were covered by an external carrier company. With the implementation of this algorithm, the number of routes could be reduced from ten to seven in one laboratory and from twelve to nine in the other, which represents significant annual savings in transportation costs. CONCLUSIONS: The algorithm presented can be easily implemented in other laboratories that face this type of problem, and it is particularly interesting and useful as the number of collection points increases. The method designs blood collection routes with reduced costs that meet the time and capacity constraints of the problem.
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spelling pubmed-39332622014-02-25 On the improvement of blood sample collection at clinical laboratories Grasas, Alex Ramalhinho, Helena Pessoa, Luciana S Resende, Mauricio GC Caballé, Imma Barba, Nuria BMC Health Serv Res Research Article BACKGROUND: Blood samples are usually collected daily from different collection points, such hospitals and health centers, and transported to a core laboratory for testing. This paper presents a project to improve the collection routes of two of the largest clinical laboratories in Spain. These routes must be designed in a cost-efficient manner while satisfying two important constraints: (i) two-hour time windows between collection and delivery, and (ii) vehicle capacity. METHODS: A heuristic method based on a genetic algorithm has been designed to solve the problem of blood sample collection. The user enters the following information for each collection point: postal address, average collecting time, and average demand (in thermal containers). After implementing the algorithm using C programming, this is run and, in few seconds, it obtains optimal (or near-optimal) collection routes that specify the collection sequence for each vehicle. Different scenarios using various types of vehicles have been considered. Unless new collection points are added or problem parameters are changed substantially, routes need to be designed only once. RESULTS: The two laboratories in this study previously planned routes manually for 43 and 74 collection points, respectively. These routes were covered by an external carrier company. With the implementation of this algorithm, the number of routes could be reduced from ten to seven in one laboratory and from twelve to nine in the other, which represents significant annual savings in transportation costs. CONCLUSIONS: The algorithm presented can be easily implemented in other laboratories that face this type of problem, and it is particularly interesting and useful as the number of collection points increases. The method designs blood collection routes with reduced costs that meet the time and capacity constraints of the problem. BioMed Central 2014-01-09 /pmc/articles/PMC3933262/ /pubmed/24406140 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-14-12 Text en Copyright © 2014 Grasas et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Grasas, Alex
Ramalhinho, Helena
Pessoa, Luciana S
Resende, Mauricio GC
Caballé, Imma
Barba, Nuria
On the improvement of blood sample collection at clinical laboratories
title On the improvement of blood sample collection at clinical laboratories
title_full On the improvement of blood sample collection at clinical laboratories
title_fullStr On the improvement of blood sample collection at clinical laboratories
title_full_unstemmed On the improvement of blood sample collection at clinical laboratories
title_short On the improvement of blood sample collection at clinical laboratories
title_sort on the improvement of blood sample collection at clinical laboratories
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3933262/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24406140
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-14-12
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