Economics of transfusion

Despite recent advances in blood screening techniques, transfusions are not risk-free procedures. Screening for viral and bacterial infections as well as other newly emerging agents continues to attract attention in the medical and health policy communities. At the same time, as healthcare costs rise and available financial resources are limited, governments and other decision-making bodies increasingly require cost-effectiveness analyses to justify (or reject) allocation of those limited resources to new technologies. These cost-effectiveness analyses can demonstrate effectively the benefits and risks of the technologies with respect to their impact on clinical, economic and patient quality-of-life outcomes. This paper reviews the costs of transfusion in several countries and discusses the cost-effectiveness of various transfusion-relevant blood safety interventions as well as other preventative measures. Blood safety measures tend to have high cost-effectiveness ratios, suggesting that the cost per life year saved is high. However, given the extraordinarily high value that society places on measures to reduce unintentional deaths and injuries, particularly those related to blood safety, and the importance of this issue in policy decision-making, such high ratios may be acceptable.