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Education Session

Education/Developing Curriculum

Making Every Unit Count: Using Immersive, AI‑Supported Training to Protect Blood Supply Resilience and Frontline Readiness

AM26-MO-10-L - Making Every Unit Count: Using Immersive, Ai‑supported Training to Protect Blood Supply Resilience and Frontline Readiness

Monday, October 19, 2026
9:45 AM - 11:00 AM EST
Room: GWCC B308-309
Proposed Session Description: Across blood centers and hospital‑based donor services, legacy classroom‑heavy training is struggling to keep pace with demand surges, workforce turnover, and increasingly complex regulations—putting both blood supply resilience and frontline readiness at risk. This session uses a large national humanitarian organization’s blood services transformation to show how immersive, AI‑supported training can dramatically shorten time‑to‑independence for blood collection staff while improving consistency, confidence, and quality.

Faculty will walk through the before‑and‑after journey, from an 11–12‑week, wait‑listed classroom model to a digital‑first blend of virtual instructor‑led training, AI roleplay, and extended‑reality simulations that reduced onboarding to 6–7 weeks, eliminated enrollment delays, and enabled more than 6,000 phlebotomy staff per year to be trained with higher satisfaction and better performance. Discussion will highlight the operational and clinical KPIs that mattered most, such as instructor productivity, knowledge retention, discard risk, and patient safety, and how these were monitored through live analytics to support continuous improvement.

Designed as an interprofessional session, it brings together laboratory professionals, nurses, physicians, patient blood management leaders, and operations/quality stakeholders who co‑own decisions about training, technology adoption, and competency frameworks. Participants will leave with a practical blueprint they can adapt to their own organizations, including strategies for engaging frontline champions, aligning curriculum to evolving practice standards, and building the business case for immersive and AI‑supported learning that makes every unit—and every learner—count

Learning Objectives:

  • Describe how legacy, classroom‑heavy training models for blood collection and transfusion staff create bottlenecks and risks for blood supply resilience, product quality, and frontline readiness.
  • Analyze the redesigned immersive, AI‑supported onboarding program, including its key modalities (virtual instructor‑led training, AI roleplay, XR simulations, and microlearning) and how they are integrated into clinical workflows from donor interaction to sample handling.
  • Evaluate the impact of the immersive training model on operational and clinical KPIs—such as time‑to‑proficiency, enrollment wait times, instructor utilization, knowledge retention, and projected discard rates—and appraise how these metrics support the business case for change.
  • Compare the roles and perspectives of laboratory professionals, nurses, physicians, and operations/quality leaders in co‑designing, implementing, and sustaining new technology‑enabled training approaches for blood collection and transfusion services.
  • Design an initial action plan for applying immersive and AI‑supported training within attendees’ own organizations by selecting one high‑impact workflow or competency and specifying desired outcomes, stakeholder roles, and success measures.