Anne K. Chinoda Skating: Chinoda started skating when she was 3. By the time she was 5, her coaches told her parents she had the potential to become a world-class skater. She gave up that dream at 17 to attend college. She no longer skates and has no desire to: “When you try to be the best at it, it’s hard to do it for the sake of doing it.” Education: Bachelor’s degree, Boston College, 1981; MBA, Webster University, 1996 Early jobs: Advertising sales at the Hartford Courant newspaper, then, after marrying Alan Chinoda, moved to Texas and worked in advertising sales at the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald Florida connection: Her husband, a native of Egypt, took a job in 1987 at Lockheed Martin, where he’s director of international business development. Chinoda arrived in Orlando without a job. She considered working in advertising for the Orlando Sentinel before taking a job as a donor recruiter for the organization that was the precursor to Florida’s Blood Centers. Personal: Chinoda has never been squeamish about needles or blood. She donates regularly. She and her husband have two sons, 18 and 16. Perspective: “I’ve come to believe over the 20 years that I’ve been here that we as human beings are at our best when we’re serving other people. And I am so blessed to have figured that out.”

In four years as CEO, Anne Chinoda has doubled the size of Florida’s Blood Centers. Now she faces a series of challenges, including younger donors who don’t give like their parents.

By the time she was in elementary school, Anne K. Chinoda was spending eight hours a day at an ice rink practicing the figure eights, spins, turns and jumps essential to becoming a world-class skater. With her parents back home in California, she trained at U.S. Figure Skating facilities in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Sun Valley, Idaho, and participated at the highest levels of U.S. Figure Skating competitions.

Trying so hard, so young, took a toll.

At 17, she grew tired of the relentless push for perfection, stepping off the path toward competing in the 1980 Olympics and into a conventional student’s life at Boston College.

Today, Chinoda, 47, doesn’t ice skate at all, not for exercise, not for fun. But the pressure to be flawless she endured from her ice skating days has served her well: Chinoda has built a successful career in an industry that doesn’t tolerate mistakes. As president and CEO of Florida’s Blood Centers, Chinoda manages a $100-million, 920-employee non-profit that’s the biggest community blood bank in the state and fourth-largest in the nation.

Since taking over as CEO in 2003, she’s doubled the size of the organization, whose operations span 21 counties in central, south and southwest Florida and account for nearly a third of the blood that’s used in hospitals in Florida.

“I love the preciseness and precision,” she says of the blood business. “We never close. And we have to do 100% of what we do 100% right all the time. There’s no margin for error. If I looked you in the eye and said, ‘99.8% of the time, I’ll get the right unit of blood to the right patient,’ are you going to feel good about our company? No. We must be impeccable 100% of the time.”

See the path blood takes from the donor's arm to the patient. Click here for narrated slideshow

Each day, hospitals in Chinoda’s service area require nearly 1,000 units of blood. Meeting that demand starts with getting nearly 1,000 people a day to walk into one of her 38 donor centers or 44 blood mobiles and offer up a vein. They have to do it for free — U.S. Food and Drug Administration rules dictate that transfused blood come from unpaid donors. (“Plasma center’’ operations that pay donors typically sell the plasma to biotech or pharmaceutical companies for research.)

Part of Chinoda’s challenge in reaching those numbers is that the World War II generation of frequent donors is dying off. Baby Boomers are good donors, Chinoda says, but “they don’t match up to their parents,” which is why Florida’s Blood Centers’ marketing strategy now includes encouraging younger people to become donors through blood drives at high schools, community colleges and universities. Another issue: Cultural influences. African-Americans and the fast-growing Hispanic population don’t give blood as frequently as Anglos. Yet another: More groups that are excluded for health concerns. For example, anyone who lived in a country when mad cow disease was found is not eligible to donate. And anyone who has even visited a country where malaria was reported must wait 12 months before donating.

Those donor trends, plus a 5% to 7% annual growth in demand for blood statewide, add up to tight blood supplies in Florida. The state, according to the FDA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is supposed to have a three- to five-day supply of blood on hand, but the reality is that there’s usually only a one-day supply — 3,000 units — in reserve. “There are times when we are literally working on a just-in-time inventory system,” she says.

Chinoda also has to deal with increased overhead caused by increased testing. During its 18-hour journey from donor to hospital, blood is sorted by type and then tested for a battery of diseases, including HIV, hepatitis, syphilis and viruses, including the West Nile. Alicia Bellido Prichard, president of the Florida Association of Blood Banks, says more tests are coming. This year, for example, Florida’s blood banks are phasing in testing for chagas, a parasitic disease of the blood becoming more common in Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Central America and Mexico. Nationally, the cost of testing each unit of blood has risen 70% in the last five years.

The bottom line for hospitals that buy blood from community organizations is that the cost is going up. A 2005 study by the American Association of Blood Banks found that the cost per unit rose 30.8% from 2001 to 2004. On average, it costs Chinoda’s operation $285 to procure, test and distribute each unit of blood.
Joe Brown, a spokesman for Orlando Regional Healthcare, which owns five hospitals in Florida’s Blood Centers’ territory, says hospitals don’t have a lot of options. “You can’t operate without blood,” Brown says. “It’s not like we can boycott or picket or stop doing hospital work.” But Brown says the bigger issue, from a hospital’s point of view, is always having enough blood — and Florida’s Blood Centers has “always come through” when one of his hospitals needed blood.

Big enough?

Chinoda, who joined Florida Blood Centers’ precursor as a donor recruiter, has risen through the ranks by aggressively growing its operations. Named director of marketing within two years after joining the non-profit, she was named executive vice president and COO in 1999 and president and CEO — the first woman to hold the job — in 2003. Along the way, she led FBC’s expansion, by either startup or acquisition, into Brevard, Lee, Marion, Martin and Sarasota counties.

Florida’s Biggest Blood Centers

Center	Headquarters	Units Per Year
Florida’s Blood Centers	Orlando	310,000
LifeSouth Community Blood Centers	Gainesville	219,000
Florida Blood Services	St. Petersburg	212,000
Community Blood Centers of South Florida	Lauderhill	192,000
Source: Florida Association of Blood Banks, 2006

In the process of growing, FBC has accumulated some pricey real estate. In 2002, for example, after Planet Hollywood went bust, FBC purchased the restaurant chain’s 200,000-sq.-ft. building and adjacent warehouse for $12.5 million and spent another $3.5 million on renovations. Had the building not been purchased through bankruptcy court, Chinoda estimates it would have cost closer to $27 million. FBC also picked up two other big buildings in 2005, when it spent $15 million to buy the financially failing South Florida Blood Banks. Of that cost, Chinoda says nearly $9 million went to buy large distribution buildings in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

The South Florida Blood Banks acquisition also came with a bit of controversy. In 2005, FBC stepped in at the request of board members of South Florida Blood Banks and representatives from the hospitals that it served. The purchase, however, put Chinoda’s non-profit in competition for donors with Lauderhill-based Community Blood Centers of South Florida, the state’s fourth-largest blood center. Dr. Charles Rouault, chief executive of Community Blood Centers of South Florida, wondered if Chinoda was out to monopolize the state’s blood supply. “I can’t rationalize why they purchased South Florida Blood Banks,” Rouault says. “That one made no sense at all, from our viewpoint at any rate.”

Chinoda says she has no plans to expand beyond FBC’s current borders. “I think we’re big enough,” she says. “We’re trying to manage what we’ve got. If a community or a hospital system says ‘please come,’ it has always been our mission to do that. But we’re not out looking to do that. We’re here to serve our community.”
Rouault still doesn’t think an Orlando-based blood center needs to be in south Florida but acknowledges that sharing the market hasn’t been so bad. In fact, he says, his agency has more donors now than it did when Florida’s Blood Centers came to town two years ago. “Competition does tend to keep you sharp,” he says.

Chinoda, who earns $385,384 a year, says FBC’s growth has been good for her organization, too. “You develop redundancy in the system, and we saw that to be extraordinarily powerful during the 2004 hurricane season when Hurricane Charley devastated our distribution center in Port Charlotte. But I have redundancy distribution in Fort Myers, so I moved everything to Fort Myers and was able to keep everything going,” she says. “No other blood center in the state has that kind of redundancy power.”

Sandy Shugart, president of Valencia Community College and a member of Florida’s Blood Centers’ board, says Chinoda is “an unusual combination of tremendous technical expertise — knowing the blood industry inside and out — but she’s also a very soulful leader. Her spirit and the way she engages people are really powerful. The organization’s bottom line is saving lives — not making money. You have to make the money in order to save the lives. It’s a means to an end. But they don’t confuse the means with the end.”

Away from work, Chinoda says she still struggles with the “demon” of trying to be perfect but has made progress. Among her volunteer work is advising women struggling to balance career and family. She tells them that the “perfect balance” between the two rarely exists — and that’s OK. “It’s about working with people to get over that illusion of perfection,” she says.

Research Connection

Florida’s Blood Centers’ headquarters is the former Planet Hollywood building in Orlando. FBC wants to collaborate with the Burnham Institute, which leases space from FBC at the building.

When the Burnham Institute for Medical Research was recruited to Orlando in 2006, Florida’s Blood Centers leased it 14,000 square feet at its headquarters, the former Planet Hollywood building. Burnham will operate out of the space until it builds its own facility at Lake Nona.

Chinoda is working to make sure FBC’s relationship with the institute doesn’t end with real estate. She also wants to collaborate with her new tenant scientifically. Burnham, which researches therapies for cancer, Alzheimer’s, arthritis and other diseases, needs something that the blood center has: Adult stem cells. The blood center harvests adult stem cells from donors, who agree to undergo a hormone treatment that stimulates their body’s production of stem cells. Then, after the volunteers donate blood, the stem cells are separated. Often, those adult stem cells are used to help cancer patients who have undergone chemotherapy or radiation treatments rebuild their immunity.

“What we do every single day, which the general public doesn’t understand, is we’re doing adult stem cell collection,” says Chinoda. “So there’s no reason why we can’t collaborate.”

Bloodlines

» Donors can give every eight weeks or up to six times a year. » Red blood cells have a shelf life of 42 days, but the average donation is transfused within three days.

» Every unit of donated blood undergoes 18 hours of testing, processing and labeling.

» Donated blood must pass 11 screening tests before it is transfused.

» Five different products can be derived from a single donation: White blood cells, red blood cells, platelets, plasma and a clotting factor.

See the path blood takes from the donor's arm to the patient. Click here for narrated slideshow