Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life | Hacker News Reader

Blood donors in Sweden get a text message when their blood saves someone's life

independent.co.uk

306 pointshippich110 comments

This could work not just for donating blood, but for pretty much any kind of service.

Imagine if you could see, in real time, how your job affects other people's lives, even in the most mundane way. It would let you see the value of what you do, and give you a reason to do it better.

I always thought about this about taxes.

If you could choose from a list of projects a la Kickstarter where YOU choose where your taxes go to, I'm sure people would not only feel better about taxes in general but would allow them to get involved in said projects.

The problem with this approach is the areas of need rarely aligns with areas of desire. What happens to those areas that need resources that nobody really cares about?

> What happens to those areas that need resources that nobody really cares about?

This is why taxes cannot be donations. Indeed, they are not donations.

I remember the people at institutional giving at my old college say that nobody wants their name on a parking lot.

Of course - if governments could raise funds by donations they would not tax. I hate taxes, but I hate the absence of taxes more :)

Are you saying that if there are more effective ways of raising money, governments necessarily know about them? I'm on your side with regards to taxing, but governments are slow-moving beasts that are often controlled by ideological moves rather than practical ones.

Governments are well-known to use every trick in the book to get more money.

Indeed, they already do it right now:

http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html

They obviously don't take in anything more than a trivial amount of money. If you think that people would donate an equivalent amount of money if their taxes were eliminated - then you must have an awful lot of faith in people's inherent generosity in the face of their own self-interest. The economically optimal decision for any one person is to not give, but in the aggregate that means we don't have funding for infrastructure, research, etc.

I'm not saying that the conclusion is wrong, but that the reasoning is, if it assumes that a government knows the most efficient way to do something.

Governments have tried plenty of ways of raising money other than tax (inflation is the classic one), but I don't think we have found a better way. While governments are not nimble, they have had a long history of testing alternative ways of paying for the things other than taxes and so far all have proved worse in the long term.

The one exception to all of this is war where people will effectively donate by buying things like war bonds or agreeing to charge non-market rates for goods, but as a solution for taxation war is hardly ideal. As I said I hate taxes, but I hate no taxes more.

I'd much rather have my name on a parking lot than on a landmine.

America has pledged not to use anti-personnel landmines(APL) anywhere outside of the Korean peninsula. I suspect (although obviously can't confirm) America has reserved this right but probably does not exercise it.

> The United States is the world’s single largest financial supporter of humanitarian mine action, which includes not only clearance of landmines, but also medical rehabilitation and vocational training for those injured by landmines and other explosive remnants of war. Since the United States Humanitarian Mine Action Program was established in 1993, the United States has provided over $2.3 billion in aid in over 90 countries for conventional weapons destruction programs.[0]

While I am quite cynical and definitively against a lot of the ways our military has been employed, the degree of safety and the diplomatic security I receive as a result of it, provides more utility to me than a parking lot.

More broadly, roads and localized infrastructure are quite important, as is the military. I agree that personally I would allocate more money for infrastructure than to the military, and agree if this is the point you were making. I do want to illustrate the counterpoints that many people (once again, not me personally) would "Rather have their names on the bombs that kill terrorists"[1], than on a highway.

[0] http://www.state.gov/t/pm/wra/c11735.htm

[1] This is a dramatic characterization and hyperbole. However, I do suspect a large swathe of the country believes this.

I don't live in America. And my country makes all kinds of crap. Clusterbombs and what not. The landmine was meant as an illustration, not as a particular item, it could just as well have been a clusterbomb or some other intrinsically negative item.

Sorry, that was a pretty ethnocentric assumption on my part. A case could be made that landmines are intrinsically negative as they are non-discriminating hazards that render large portions of land unsafe well after a conflict has ended. Bombs, missiles tanks etc, I am not so sure of. I would appraise them as neutral, with the potential to be negative or positive.

It is not a donation, because you don't get chose not to pay. You get to choose where to send the money. I don't see how this couldn't work with a high portion of the money.

Because we should budget for the cost of actual programs, and not have to guess based on how much various constituencies might allocate their tax dollars.

I wouldn't mind if gasoline tax went only towards road maintenance.

We should move carefully though because I am sure hard earmarking can be disastrous if taken all the way.

If nobody cares about a given area, why is it being maintained?

It's hard to imagine any system where areas that nobody cares for get funded.

Some countries in EU have 2% of income tax support, i.e. If you are a tax payer in Lithuania and would like to support the development of non-profit/school/academy or sport club, you can do so by transferring 2% of your income tax to the administrating enterprise. And you can change/donate it every year.

While that is very good, at the same time 2% is pretty much nothing. Why not make it so that 50% is payers choice? (I wouldn't make it 100% only because there are too many people who wouldn't want to fund the military).

According to a slapdash google search, the 2015 federal income due to taxes is $3.9 trillion, and about half of that comes from income tax. 2% of that is $20 million dollars.

I want to say that that's not nothing, but the Rosetta equipment alone cost €220 million. I'm not even sure how much of an impact $20m would have if you spread it across, e.g., the New York public school system.

($3.9T / 2) * 2% = $39 billion

https://www.google.com/search?q=2%25+of+3%2C900%2C000%2C000%...

It is quite something in terms of money but it feels like nothing? 2%? 3%? 0%? Those can be simplified to 0% which makes day to day living easier.

I hope you don't work in a math related field.

Ugh, well, that was probably my most embarrassing comment. That's what I get for trying to math right before going to sleep.

Why does the military need a special exception compared to the orphanage down the road?

Actually I think I could work such that when you are unemployed or getting money from the government coffers you also get a notice with a name and picture of the person who payed tax to give you that. Sorta like "your income this months was made possible by the hard work of $NAME" - would you be more or less inclined to abuse government founds this way?

That would be passive-aggressive abuse. Unemployment is rarely a choice, yet society likes to make the unemployed feel that way. This would add insult to injury.

Don't you think it could be phrased as a warm community support message?

It's not about the how but the why. Social welfare is a matter of decency, not a luxury. What good does it do to couple that with a sense of sponsorship other than to elicit a feeling of guilt? This is just sociopathic Ayn Randian bullshit, not beneficial to anyone at all.

"Congratulations, Herr Schmidt, your 2014 taxes have just been spent on a chandelier for the rebuilt Berlin city palace!"

"Congratulations Ms Smith, your 2013 taxes have provided 0.01% of the cost of a missile that was just deployed in Afghanistan!"

If we could choose how our taxes were used (a libertarian dream of mine for awhile), we'd have really lumpy funding. Hopefully it'd cause our military to be defunded, but the VA would probably end up taking the brunt of the hit.

Along those lines, I bet the funding of NASA would be even lumpier than it usually is. Don't they have difficulty planning engineering efforts because they're not sure if congress is going to continue funding next year?

Here's a thought: why don't NASA and other gov research institutes have an endowment instead? The government can add in a one-time lump sum and then periodically add the typical budget to the endowment? I imagine this would be pretty hairy though. It could be just another fund to get ransacked by congress on a rainy day, and there'd easily be controversy about how the fund was invested.

I think telemarketers don't need much reminding.

> "How your job affects other people's lives"

You mean, how a software developer might be helping companies be more efficient, meaning they can now lay off people with lower income jobs because their services are no longer required?

I like this idea for blood donations though!

I'm going to assume that people getting laid off is the fault of software makers and software makers only, for the sake of argument of course.

Even then, it's good to know how your work affects people, whether positive or negative. At least you see the result of your work in the big picture, and have a chance to do something about it.

That assumes that those jobs would have existed without your software - and that the factory/warehouse wouldn't simply have closed and caused even further job loss.

I think it's a very important idea that will be most useful in incentivizing people to produce open content or otherwise donate their time and money. It's the idea behind the new StackExchange user pages:

>How many people have you helped?

> “People Reached” is a new way to see just how much your efforts here matter. For the first time ever, you can see roughly how many times an actual human being – very likely one looking for help – found your contributions here. Personally, I like to call it the “Saving-the-frigging-world-o-meter”.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/04/two-new-user-pages-one...

This is available crudely for Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics http://stats.grok.se/

I think it should be a very high priority for the project to allow users to quickly and attractively integrate this into their userpage (and by default for new users). Could help reverse the slow atrophy of the wikipedia user base.

Well, I have an unbaked thought that says assigning numbers to people's contribution to the world is going to create the wrong kind of incentives.

The problem is that it's (probably) impossible to summarize someone's effects on other people into a number. We're seeing that even quantifying school performance ends up being counter-productive.

For me, the ideal is that instead of seeing how many people you've helped, or how much you've helped them, or any other quantified view of your work, you are just somehow able to see the story of how you helped them. Who did you help, in what situation? And it doesn't have to be something big like saving lives. Just, mundane, everyday stuff.

I think that's more of a concern when there is a principal-agent problem. Yes, if you pay me X $/widget but are unable to measure widget quality well, then I may try to maximize number of widgets produced at the expense of quality. (And it may make sense to use other incentive structures.) But if I'm trying to help people, it's much less likely that I'll stupidly maximize a metric (# of page views) by lowering quality. What have I to gain? (This of course because a problem as soon as you start tangibly rewarding me based on the metric, or if the metric influences my public reputation, etc.)

I see. But I think this "system that lets you see how what you do affects other people" should be applied to everything we do, not just charity. It should be mainly about your job and what you do that pays you.

I wanna say why I think this is a good idea, but I'm curious to know whether it's obvious to other people why this could be a good thing.

The Gamification of saving lives! fk yeah! - "I AM LEVEL 3, yesssssss." (3-lives saved)

Many places already do that... counting the number of times a person has donated (not actually used) and giving them some status accordingly.

Except we now live in the Internet age...where nothing happens unless you can post it on Twitter or Facebook.

Speak for yourself.

Maybe they should post it on Twitter too - "@JoezyDeco just saved the life of a premature infant." (Graphic of a God Mode badge.) ;-)

That's exactly it. I'm proud when I go and donate and I get to show the staff at the end my card that says I've donated 47 times. I spoke with a Canadian Blood Service staff member once and she said that people compete all the time. You can donate plasma (or platelets) every 2 weeks, so people use that to pad their numbers.

And that's the right place to use it to get people involved. Better than "7 people like your comment", "John and Mary endorsed you", ...

This is really one of a few examples of "hooking" people for good. There is even a book "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" about it: http://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Product...

Genius. Maybe go the same route with organ donation, let you brag about how many people you saved on the way out. "And Joan is survived by two loyal sons as well as two children who formerly had leukemia."

Achievement: Bronze Blood Donor (10 donations)

Achievement: Super Hero (10 lives saved)

I think this is importantly different. What's usually called gamification is when you create a ticker/counter/award and convince a person to pursue that as a goal even though it has no other real-world importance. This basically hi-jacks the natural good feeling people get when they accomplish an intermediate goal (on the way to an intrinsic goal). It's like the fact that I can make up a goal (flicking a folded piece of paper through a gap in a cubicle -- and arbitrary game) and it feels good to accomplish it.

On the other hand, the blood donation text message is connecting the person to the goal they already had: to help others. It makes the satisfaction of this pre-existing goal more salient and unambiguous. I think it's a lot like the theory behind clicker training for animals.

https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/virtual-pet-behaviorist/click...

> What's usually called gamification is when you create a ticker/counter/award and convince a person to pursue that as a goal even though it has no other real-world importance.

I'm not sure this is right - there are plenty of examples where gamification is being used for real-life tasks. Things like recycling, exercising, dieting, shopping, etc. Look at how many todo list apps give you points for completing tasks.

Fair enough. Then you can read my comment as "The term 'gamification' covers two very different concepts, one of which is very constructive...".

Also, there seems to be a big difference between (1) "you completed the errand of picking up the milk; you get 10 million super points and this e-Trophy" and (2) "here are the real-world implications of your actions".

What a genius idea to raise awareness. This seems like a no-brainer for blood banks, hospitals, public health and so on.

I think it's a terrible idea. That reverse track from specific use of blood to phone number of the source should not even exist.

That probably must exist to track potential problem with donor's blood in case it wasn't spotted

And also, people generally like being appreciated personally. I'd imagine that named donations prevail over anonymous in most cases.

Exactly. The fact Sweden can do this is a comfort: it speaks to amazing inventory management.

So that if a donor is diagnosed with an infectious disease you have to throw away all blood in the centre? There are good reasons to track the provenance of blood.

No, but you will have to throw away all blood products from that donor and you will have to pass the message back to the collection point so they can alert the donor.

So yes, you need to be able to track the provenance of the blood but the final recipient of the product should not have the ability to contact the donor directly, nor should the donor have knowledge of when and/or where their blood was used.

This can all be done without having a phone number or other identifiable data attached to the blood product other than a serial number which goes back to the collection point.

Centralizing this data is a very dangerous thing and could have un-intended consequences for the donors.

> Centralizing this data is a very dangerous thing and could have un-intended consequences for the donors.

Such as...?

Let's see:

- your blood contains your DNA, so you not only give out something to help others, you also give out your biological finger-print

- insurance companies might use lab results + identifying info to deny insurance

- your blood contains information on your heritage

And I'm sure there are many more examples like that.

Maybe I'm over-sensitive to data collected for no particular purpose but NL has a pretty bad record when it comes to this sort of thing and in fact people have died because of the innocent collection of something as mundane as religious affiliation.

All reasonable concerns, but your identity is connected to blood donations anyway in many places anyway, not least because of disease management as discussed above. If any bad actors in the scenarios you describe want access to your DNA and you are int he habit of donating blood, it's trivially easy for them to get it anyway. In the US you have to give your name, show ID, and give your SSN to donate blood (at least to he Red Cross), so any idea you had of anonymity is already long gone. I don't feel like researching it on a country-by-country basis right now but I don't think that IDing yourself is exceptional.

The only new thing I'm seeing here is that you get a text message when your donation is used, and it's in that context I'm saying it's a good thing. I can't donate blood in the US (have spent too much of my life in Europe, so it's possible my blood is too socialist) but I wouldn't have had any expectation of privacy if I did so beyond normal confidentiality laws.

> your blood contains your DNA, so you not only give out something to help others, you also give out your biological finger-print

Anyone who wants your DNA is going to have an easier time stealing it from your coffee cup in the garbage than a blood bank.

> insurance companies might use lab results + identifying info to deny insurance

Insurance companies in the US are no longer allowed to deny coverage for preexisting conditions under the ACA, and are already generally entitled to review your lab results as part of your contract with them.

> your blood contains information on your heritage

So does your birth certificate.

Preventing the linking of the blood to its donor means the donor can't be informed if it turns out they had a serious blood-borne disease.

The blood bags doesn't show the donor's phone number, it has a bar code on it with a serial number. My guess is that when they remove the bag from stock, they scan the bag and a text message gets sent from some server. The recipient have no way of knowing where the blood came from unless they have access to the database, which of course they don't. The blood donor doesn't know who got the blood, only that it's been used.

It's not centralized, just tracked. If you want centralized, there's a biobank in Stockholm that contains tissue samples from everyone born in Sweden since 1975.

Or how about the other way? If you know when your blood is used and where, you might be able to make assumptions about who is getting transfusions. Granted that's probably small potatoes compared to all of the other privacy concerns in health, but hopefully this program is optional for the recipients.

This also recently started happening in Australia, I got a text message 3 weeks ago saying my blood was used in Liverpool hospital. It was pretty fun knowing where it helped someone.

Life hacks. On a date in Sweden? Arrange your buddy to send you a text message saying you just saved someone's life. Watch jealousy turn to desire when you get a text message (another girl??), and say, "Oh - I just saved someone's life. See?"

I'm just kidding. My real point is that a mailed letter (or email) sounds more appropriate than a text message. But then again maybe not!

Wouldn't work in the US, I find that the social value of having saved someone's life is somewhere between zero and negative, unless that someone belongs to your interlocutor's subculture.

You tell an investor in SF, in passing, "I talked a junkie off the bridge and took her away before the cops showed up, and let her stay at my place for six months until she cleaned up", and they'll think you are mad, not honorable.

(Not a true story; composite of three separate incidents)

>"I talked a junkie off the bridge and took her away before the cops showed up, and let her stay at my place for six months until she cleaned up"

It's reassuring to know I'm not the only one who got an ex-girlfriend this way.

Nah, I have a guest room with its own door. Don't stick your dip in crazy, and all that.

I'd probably think both.

I wish I was allowed to donate blood. This is a great idea, I hope other countries adopt it.

Why aren't you allowed ?

it doesn't really matter, does it? I wouldn't ask here, it's not everyone's business.

(not that it implies anything specific, it's just not really strangers' business - OP has detailed profile info up. I would ask in private if you really want to know.)

I think he implied that it is for a dumb reason why he isn't allowed, that's why i asked. But yeah, i shouldn't.

If the commenter hadn't intended for someone to ask the question why did they mention it? Conversational protocol dictates the hearer engage with what was said. Asking for more information on one or more aspects of an open communication is normal.

In different countries, there are various reasons, some better than others. Chronic illnesses like hepatitis, having had gay sex, having lived in Britain in 1980's. These contribute some risk to donating blood.

Also having malaria, paying money or sex for drugs, lived in Africa for 6 months, ever had a blood transfusion, dura matter transplant... the list goes on. In Canada, every time you donate you answer about 13 questions on your own, then a nurse asks you about 10 "high risk" questions. You can tell they could recite them in their sleep, and I'm almost at the point where I could as well.

Men who have sex with men; intravenous drug use; are the two big restrictions that are common.

http://www.blood.co.uk/giving-blood/who-cant-give-blood/

One major reason is if you were in the UK for more than 6 months between 1980-1996. You can't donate blood in Australia afaik if this is the case.

This was due to the BSE, 'mad cow disease'

There are lots of arbitrary rules out there to minimize risk. I lived in Sweden for more than 6 months before 2004 so they deem me a BSE risk. Oddly enough Sweden didn't have any cases of BSE until 2006 so I'm not sure about the logic behind that one.

Same with me. I use to donate blood in Sweden but after moving to the US I'm not allowed anymore

It makes me sad to see people who donate or contribute to charity for popularity. The idea behind giving blood--or other community services--is to help society as a hole, not your ego. Charity should not be flashed like a status symbol.

If a charity is wasting time and money developing systems to stroke your ego, they should just skip the step and sell themselves to Fleshlight. Their time and money should be spent on improving the lives of those in need, not by stroking off some people.

This is a simple and cheap method to get more people to male the altruistic[1] step of donating blood.

It's not much fun; it's sort of awkward for some people; we could probably do woth more people donating blood.

The blood banks have a choice: spend money on tv ads, or spend money doing this. Why are ads okay and this terrible?

[1] I'm not interested in philosophy of altruism.

Who said ads are okay? Wasting money that you promise to put towards a goal on something else is, in my mind, wrong.

People already know donating blood is a good and charitable act. We don't need someone to tell us that.

How are they supposed to get more people to donate blood?

Might work for some people but not for me. I'd start worrying I'm not donating enough. With plasma you can donate every two weeks which is pretty often, I only go once every four weeks. However I liked the chocolates that were handed out at the blood bank around Christmas time last year (Australia). Oh and in case your wondering they used to offer beer in refreshment but that was cut out a couple of years ago. But they do have wifi now :-).

Interesting. In the US you can donate plasma twice a calendar week as long 48 hours separates the donations.

I use to do red blood and double red as frequently as a I could, the day I became eligible again was the day I donated. When you do something like that you can't worry if you are donating enough - you know that you are doing everything you are allowed to do.

My friend, you may be suffering from ALAS.

http://www.davidbrin.com/givingplague.html

So, how long until someone figures out that they don't actually need to save someone's life to send a text message? And what about using the blood when someone's life is not saved, does that not warrant a text message?

How come the entities using the blood and/or distributing it have access to the phone numbers of the donors?

You try turning up at ha hospital with a bag of blood and saying "here's some blood, but I won't say who it's from".

I'd hope that would get you arrested in short order and held until you come up with a very good and verifiable explanation about where the blood came from.

Who donated the blood is important at the point of capture, where you want to analyse the blood and make sure that neither the plasma nor the cells carry anything other than benefits to the eventual recipient.

But who exactly sourced the blood should be of no concern to the agency that ends up using it, and if there is a problem the only thing they should have to go back on should be an un-identifiable serial number that they can use to report back to the collection agency to make sure they destroy the rest of the blood from that lot and mark that particular donor as un-acceptable.

What should happen beyond that is up to the local legislation, presumably the donor should be warned and the screening process should be improved so a similar thing will never happen again, if a problem with blood products is only discovered at the time of use then that's a process failure much more than a problem with that blood.

This may well be what happens. The hospital informs the agency that they've used SN547825482 and that agencies database triggers a text message.

>try turning up at ha hospital with a bag of blood

I have Rhnull and that is the only way I would donate my blood, ever. My mom (who also has this type) has been looked down as a emergency bag of blood on a few occasions and living with that is terrible experience.

In fact, I installed tor just to post this.

The title is misleading. As I understand it from the text and photo of the sms (i don't speak swedish), messages are sent when the blood is used. It doesn't say whether it saved somebodies life or not.

The text message says "Thanks! The blood you donated on January 13, 2015 has now been beneficial for a patent. Best regards, the Blood Centre."

I can tell you that there is currently a lack of blood in Sweden, so I am pretty sure your blood will be used.

Hell, today someone threw in a hand grenade in an apartment complex. No worries, there will always be a need of blood. :I

In the US, the entity that collects the blood can have a lot of requirements to notify the donor about and report infectious disease, so they are required to maintain records about the donors. They also generally happen to be the entity that distributes the blood.

I would guess that the implementation has the hospital passing a list of numbers read from barcodes to the blood center and then the center either sending the messages or passing phone numbers to the county council mentioned in the article.

I think I agree with your reaction though.

There's nothing in the article that says they do. They say they get a message from the blood collection agency when they donate and another when their blood is used.

I imagine it works pretty much as you suggested below: each bag of blood is identified with a serial number, the collection agency is alerted when that bag is used, this triggers a message from them to the donor.

Would you be happy with that?

In fact, here in Turkey, a similar service is in use for several years now.

Turkish Red Crescent does that too. It works.

My friend Regan Gill once worked for the Seattle blood bank. She said business was always hopping after the bars closed, espcially on friday and saturday nights.

On time a bag of blood broke open while she was carrying a case of blood down a long hallway. It looked just like she'd dragged a stiff down the hall.

Hasn't the gamification and the application of Pavlovian behavior online gone already too far?

I mean this trend of employing FB notifications like Dopamine/Serotonin rewarding systems is getting out of hand and we need to address it properly.

You just received the Great Point Achievement. Congratulations. Share with your friends <url here>. View their achievements and badges here.

Blood donation is not very efficient charity and the service is homophobic and (in the US) nationalistic (no the entirety of Europe doesn't have mad cow disease). Instead of sending these feel good SMS messages they should work on solving those two issues.

So what do you think Sweden should do about the nationalism of the US' blood donation system?

Am I the only one who thinks donating blood is a bad idea based on personality of the donor? I know that this article refers to organ transplant, but I also have read articles talking about how blood donations can affect personality:

http://www.medicaldaily.com/can-organ-transplant-change-reci...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com