Italian hospitals use RFID to share blood and monitor blood transfusions
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Four Italian hospitals began to pilot an RFID-based system to track every step of the blood transfusion process: from the collection of patient blood samples to the end of the blood transfusion.
The four hospitals participating in the implementation plan are the Second University General Hospital in Rome, the Pain Recovery Center of St. John, the Hospital of the Political College of Bari, and the 3 USL Company in the town of Pistoia. These experimenters used 3RFID’s blood transfusion system (BTS). The system consists of EPC Gen 2 RFID hardware desktop and handheld interrogator, as well as tags and software.
Human error is a big worry for blood transfusions. In the process of blood collection, donation, transportation and blood transfusion, one mistake can lead to fatal consequences. Giuseppe Ancona, CEO of 3RFID, said, “If no one discovers this mistake, the patient will be given a wrong blood transfusion, causing great health damage and death in the worst case.”
Ancona said: “Knowing who does what is very important-so that you can increase personal responsibility and improve safety.” With the BTS system, the identity of the blood collection manager is entered and stored together with other data.
With the assistance of this instrument, patients admitted to the hospital will receive a wristband with an EPC Gen 2 RFID tag, which stores a unique identification number connected to the patient’s data in the hospital’s back-end system. These data include patient cases and photos. If a blood transfusion is required, the patient’s blood sample will be placed in a test tube, and a PC Gen 2 RFID tag encoded with the patient’s unique disease number is attached to the outside of the test tube. An EPC RFID tag encoded by the same principle will also be attached to the blood request document, and other RFID tags that also encode the patient number will be attached to the blood bag.
Once the patient’s blood type is determined, the staff will remove the blood bag containing the corresponding blood type from the blood bank and attach the RFID tag to it. During the blood transfusion, the hospital staff will scan the patient’s cuff label and the label on the blood bag to confirm that the blood type matches. People who perform the blood transfusion process also scan the RFID tags embedded in their identity badges. Then the employee’s data will be associated with the patient and blood transfusion records, and a permanent record will be established in the hospital database, indicating who and when the blood transfusion was performed.
Most hospitals in Italy use barcode labels to track blood bags internally. Barcode labels are encoded with unique numbers associated with patients’ medical information in the database, but other hospitals or health care institutions cannot read these barcodes. Thus, when a bag of blood was sent to another hospital. The technicians there are required to track the blood distribution through the recipient’s name and birth date marked on the blood bag. If an error is detected before dispensing, the blood transfusion must be canceled and new blood will be requested.
With the help of the BTS system, the system will track the entire process. Every hospital participating in this project has a server where anyone can obtain blood transfusion data by entering a password, so that the hospital can share data when blood bags are transferred between hospitals or medical centers.
This pilot program will end in June 2008. Ancona said: “We hope to obtain technical reports from the hospitals,” he also said, “We hope that participating hospitals can collect all the information needed to optimize and improve the operability of the user interface.”
Ancona said: “Our goal is to plan the development of a real-time blood tracking system and upgrade the existing system.” If everything goes well, the next step will be to establish a nationwide blood network between hospitals, and the hospitals will pass an agreement with the local administrative department. To share this network.
Until now, Ancona said: “This pilot plan shows that the technology is easy to apply, reduces the workload, and 100% eliminates the chance of error.”
Donato Dimonte, Dean of the Bari Institute of Political Science Hospital, said: “By avoiding any human error in the blood bag distribution process, we hope to improve the safety identification of patients and blood donors.” Ancona said that he also hopes that this network will allow the hospital to be internal And better integration of multi-functional hospitals using different blood centers.
Dimonte said: “We hope to achieve perfect integration in this system network in order to achieve more optimized patient monitoring and care.” If the trial goes well, he said, “We will adopt this system and expand it as much as possible. More hospitals.”
In Bologna Grand Hospital in Italy, another blood tracking RFID system designed and installed by Tiomed was applied. A hospital in Saarbrücken, Germany is using an RFID solution provided by Siemens Business Services to track blood. In 2007, the Wisconsin Blood Center worked with several commercial technology partners to start testing and determine whether RFID is harmful to blood products.
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