Blood Center of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang, China (People's Republic)
Background/Case Studies: The RFID task force within the ISBT Working Party on Information Technology has published the ISBT Guidelines for the use of RFID Technology in Transfusion Medicine,Version 1.0 in 2010. It can be seen that the ISBT has formed a relatively complete scheme for the application of RFID in transfusion medicine. With the maturity of the Internet of Things technology and the decrease of the cost of RFID tags, Blood Center of Zhejiang Province has introduced RFID tags in 2019, to explore innovation in the process of blood and blood products management.
Study
Design/Methods: RFID technology, Blood enterprise computing system and Automation equipments(such as tunnel machine, Component Processing instrument, robot storage) realize information sharing and interaction through interface, and applied to the business scenarios of blood collection, handover, component processing, and distribution. The main innovations include: (1) Reaching a consensus with the blood bag manufacturer, the blood bag will be labeled with RFID chip when it is produced in the factory, and write into the information about Blood bag and Blood donation in advance. Therefore, The blood bags enter the blood center warehouse and sent to the collection site, staffs can read and query information in batches and in real time,improving the work efficiency. (2) A blood product can be formed after the blood component processing, meanwhile,the information of blood products can be written into the existing RFID chip,and realize each bag of blood information association,including Blood product and Blood bag, Test tube,Blood donation. Since there is no need to reprint the label with RFID chip, the cost of label production can be reduced. The above two applications are the first to be realized in Blood Center,in China.
Results/Findings: Through practice, compared with the time of RFID scanning and barcode scanning, it is estimated that the efficiency of RFID scanning can be improved by about 15 times in the management of blood bag storage, blood receiving, blood centrifugation and quick-freezing. At the same time, the use of RFID reading and writing function can reduce the number of RFID tags, the cost of at least 50%. Conclusions: The research of RFID technology in the process of blood and blood products management is innovative and applicable. Of course, the ISBT 128 barcode technology widely used at present is unlikely to be replaced by RFID technology soon, and the following two technologies will coexist. In the specific use process, it is necessary to determine to adopt whether RFID technology or barcode technology according to the specific situation, in order to meet the different requirements of use.
Importance of research: RFID technology can identify high-speed moving objects and multiple tags at the same time, and it is fast and convenient to operate. It is also a key driving factor to improve the productivity and safety of the blood products supply chain. Therefore, introducing RFID technology into the blood center processes is an inevitable result to ensure the safety of blood transfusion.
