The Clinical Allocation of Joint Blood Product Costs : A Research Note

Transfusion services in England provide a joint platelet product and a more costly, but better quality, non-joint alternative. Unfortunately, management is unsure of the optimal manufacturing balance between the two because, for reasons of accounting expediency, all joint costs are allocated to red cells and not to platelets. Purchasers and users may be unaware of this problem because of supplementary costs, incurred beyond the split-off point, that creates a finite transfer price. In response, this study introduces a consensus clinical view of joint blood product manufacture, as an alternative basis for allocating joint costs, and presents pilot data. When this model is examined in the context of the accounting literature a number of parallels emerge. Furthermore, the history of transfusion points strongly to the clinical outcome value of products as the overriding driver of short-term manufacturing as well as its long-term development, lending support to the use of clinical consensus in the derivation of allocations. This contrasts with the use of quantitative red cell demand as the main cost driver in the current transfusion service model