RFID to Take the Chill Out of Frozen Plasma Tracking

With the RFID system, a tag will be attached to each of the four blood bags for a single donation, along with a bar-coded and printed label. (Because the hospitals will not have RFID readers, FBSTIB will continue to use the printed labels to confirm product information.)The single bar-code number for that donor's blood will be linked to unique ID numbers on the label of each accompanying empty sub-product bag, as well as on the bag filled with blood. When a mother bag is first filled, information is input into the BBIMS system at the mobile donation clinic, including the donor's identity and blood type, the clinic's location, and the date and time.

The bags will then all be taken to the processing center, where three desktop RFID readers cabled to the back-end system will be used to read each tag's ID number. The interrogators will be used each time the blood is tested or broken into sub-products, and additional bar-coded labels will still be attached, thereby providing a printed listing of the events, as well as bar-coded numbers that could be used by the hospital. But the Aifos software will also allow the data to be encoded on the RFID tag.

After plasma is extracted, it must be moved into the frozen plasma chamber. It is loaded into cases and carried through the door to the chamber, where an Alien fixed interrogator will read the unique ID number encoded to each tag, and capture the direction of the bags as they pass into and out of the chamber. That data will be transmitted to Aifos' software, to be translated and stored on the BBIMS on FBSTIB's back-end database. The staff must work quickly, as plasma defrosts in 16 minutes. The extreme cold in the chamber, however, makes it difficult to work there for an extended period of time. With RFID, they will be able to either identify the product more quickly using a PDA with a built-in RFID interrogator manufactured by NordicID, or carry a case out of the chamber. If the case is carried out, the device will record the time that occurred, and Aifos' software will issue an alert if it spends too much time outside the chamber before being returned.

Managers with an authorized user password can utilize the data to view information regarding the inventory and screening processes.

The system is expected to dramatically reduce labor hours previously spent scanning the bags' bar-coded labels, Muncunill says. "Now, we can find very specific bags stored in extreme conditions," he states.

The system is slated to go live in September 2010, if integration is completed as planned. The FBSTIB receives 40,000 donations annually, and will be tagging only red blood cells and plasma (not platelets, which do not spend much time in storage and are easy to track visually), totaling approximately 60,000 bags per year. Aifos will provide the RFID system to FBSTIB for a monthly fee. Due to the reduction in labor, Muncunill says his organization hopes to recoup that fee immediately.