“White Coats” is an AABB Newsseries that interviews the experts that are transforming the fields of transfusion medicine and biotherapies. Join AABB today to read the rest of this month’s issue.
Since May 2012, Bill Block has been leading Blood Centers of America (BCA) as its president and CEO. With a strong foundation in economics, Block has spent more than two decades in leadership roles in the health care field. His career highlights have included managing two medical device companies and holding senior positions at notable firms such as Baxter, Cardinal Health and Allegiance.
Under Block’s leadership, BCA has advanced its supply chain and risk management in critical areas. He has played a pivotal role in advancing BCA’s plasma recovery and sourcing operations, securing more than 1 million liters of plasma under contract. Additionally, Block has driven the development of a comprehensive donor data analytics program, encompassing more than 120 million donation records.
Block has also played a key role in expanding the advanced therapy network to optimize its decentralized manufacturing capabilities. Block spoke to AABB News about his career path, cybersecurity trends and best practices for safeguarding the integrity of the blood supply.
Who or what influenced your career path in transfusion medicine and biotherapies?
After my active-duty Army service, I was fortunate enough to land my early jobs in health care. I have worked for companies like Baxter, Cardinal Health and McKesson and ran several smaller companies in wound care and surgical instruments before being recruited about 12 years ago to my current role at BCA.
I was intrigued by the blood/transfusion business/biotherapies as I had not spent a lot of time in my career working in this space. I loved the aspect that the work of the cooperative and the independent community blood centers across the country truly does have life-saving impact, but this work also has a strong business dynamic that is essential for the country’s sustainability of the blood supply.
What is the most rewarding aspect of your career in transfusion medicine and biotherapies?
I work with a great team along with altruistically minded individuals at blood centers throughout the country. We have demonstrated many joint successes by finding common ground and collaborating with numerous stakeholders to accomplish these achievements. The people make this work especially rewarding, and we all have a life-saving aspect to our roles. I also love the fast-paced nature of the biotherapies market and the evolving roles of our blood centers.
In 2024 we signed a contract with a new company that leverages our decentralized manufacturing network across the country with cleanroom and cryopreservation capabilities. Our blood centers give the biomanufacturer the opportunity to put the biotherapy much closer to where the patient lives.
What is the greatest cybersecurity risk associated with managing the blood supply chain, and how can blood and biotherapies leaders mitigate the risk(s)?
We have four components to our business continuity/cybersecurity plan focusing on cybersecurity (preparedness and response); supply chain risk; inventory management; and donor sustainability. Our goal with cybersecurity is to leverage the cooperative’s collective strengths to make ourselves more resilient to any kind of attack or disruption.
This includes plans around device monitoring, blood resource sharing and supplier risk mitigation. For instance, there is one leuko-reduction filter plant in Italy that makes most of the industry’s filters. There is not a lot of manufacturing redundancy, so we have to plan for this with inventory readiness.
What are your recommendations for assessing the cybersecurity readiness of blood supply chain partners, such as blood donation centers and hospitals?
As part of our physical audit team at BCA, we focus a lot on understanding what our suppliers’ raw material supply chain looks like. We have a critical manufacturing partner who manufactures out of Puerto Rico. In the audit process and our business continuity focus, we were made aware that more than 60% of their raw material suppliers also are from the Caribbean market. This puts the risk of disruption very high for any type of natural disaster, such as a hurricane also impacting the raw material suppliers as well as the plant. This particular supplier has helped to mitigate this with a recent license request to the FDA for its plant in the Czech Republic.
Your presentation during the AABB cybersecurity summit, held in conjunction with the 2024 AABB Annual Meeting, addressed cybersecurity challenges and mitigating risks related to the blood supply chain. How can organizations ensure supplier business continuity of operations in the event of a cybersecurity breach?
We have focus/risk mitigation plans in two main areas when it comes to cybersecurity threats: the supplier being impacted; and the blood center being impacted. We are encouraging our centers to plan for these events and rehearse these in their disaster planning since we know they will likely have to operate in a manual mode for a period of time.
BCA has a strong and successful history in resource sharing to support centers that are not able to operate for any reason. Supplementing this as necessary is the participation of BCA on the AABB Interorganizational Task Force on Domestic Disasters and Acts of Terrorism, which convenes all key stakeholders during emergencies to help facilitate resources and solutions to impacted areas in very effective ways.
Additionally, we strongly encouraged our centers to take advantage of satellite communication offerings that can allow for centers to remain in good communication both telephonically and through satellite internet.
These tools are now very cost effective and allow for seamless communication when a center temporarily loses internet/ wireless and power. We also have contracts for emergency fuel and generator back-ups, which have previously been deployed effectively.
In the event of a cyberattack and/or mass casualty events, what is your organization’s plan for safeguarding the integrity of the blood supply?
We have a strong third-party logistics (3PL) partnership with a company that is now keeping between 30-45 days of critical medical plastics for our members, so if there is a surge in capacity needed, we have inventory at the ready. This critical inventory within our 3PL partner is regionally located ensuring a one-to-two-day delivery to our centers.
Additionally, we leverage our donor analytics tools (15+ years of 28 million donor and 120 million donation records) to help centers continue to proactively grow their donor bases so that we are more prepared with long-term blood supply sustainability.
Our donor analytic tool can also be used to support centers if their systems are impacted in the short term with the information we have about current donors and areas where similar cohorts exist to target blood donations. We house all the donor records in different data clouds that are agnostic from the blood centers. Last year, our procedure growth for platelets was about 6% and donors continued to grow with our red cells by more than 3%.
Looking ahead, what emerging cybersecurity trends do you foresee impacting the blood supply chain? How can the field stay ahead?
We are not trying to think of all the answers from within our industry. For instance, we just spoke to the director of cybersecurity for Major League Baseball (from an introduction from one of our member CEOs). They have put in some great protections for their teams and fans that might be a fit for some of our members to leverage.
If every blood center is working on their own plan here, we believe it will be less robust and more costly. Cybersecurity is a very fast-changing threat environment, and we need to be nimble with adjusting accordingly. Collaborations will be critical in future plans.
What is the best decision you have made about your career?
I have really appreciated being a part of a strong team in the medical field where we can ultimately move the needle in helping to improve quality of life/save lives. I have been fortunate to work at large and small businesses in this space and have been able to leverage this in my role at BCA.
What is your proudest accomplishment to date?
A big part of running a cooperative is building and leveraging the success of members in the cooperative and establishing a great team to help with successful execution. We have had significant success in driving contract standardization in a cooperative with many differing viewpoints; the membership and BCA worked closely to quickly ramp up our COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) collections during a very difficult and stressful time for all involved.
Despite that, we were able to help drive collections of this critical and life-saving therapy to more than 700,000 doses. Lastly, our team and our members have been successful in helping to mitigate risk in a fragile supply chain by being disruptive in their thinking and willing to adjust to new conditions in a nimble manner.
What are your favorite leisure activities outside of work?
I enjoy spending time with our family, our two boys and my wife Kathy. I really enjoy exercising and trying to keep fit. This includes hiking, cycling, running and body building (just kidding about the last one).
