Reducing medical errors and enhancing the safety and quality of healthcare delivery is widely recognized as a national priority. In this regard, enabling error-free delivery of blood products is a key component of enhancing overall healthcare safety. While the general public associates blood transfusion risk with exposure to infectious hazards, mis-transfusion (mismatch between patient and blood) is the most prevelant serious hazard of transfusion.
The Transfusion Medicine RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Consortium is actively engaged in the first-ever comprehensive investigation to research, develop and introduce innovative application of RFID for automatic identification, tracking and status-monitoring of blood and blood products across all entities in the supply chain – from the point of collection, through blood product manufacturing and distribution, to delivery of a product by a healthcare provider to a patient. The goal is to develop an innovative RFID-enabled blood product tracking solution (to complement barcoding) that will overcome associated technical and policy environment challenges and complement good manufacturing practices using a quality systems approach.
Click on the sections below to learn more about the Study Objectives, Guiding Principles, and Approach followed by our study team, and explore the various sections of the website to gain a better understanding of how High-Frequency RFID technology can help overcome a number of common challenges and process inefficiencies associated with identification and tracking of blood products from vein-vein.
Study Objectives
Guiding Principles
Approach
The use of RFID technology in blood banks and transfusion medicine has the potential to improve operational efficiency, reduce cost, and advance patient safety in the delivery of transfusion services at the hospital.
To realize the benefits of RFID, there must be industry definition and adoption of consistent standards for its use throughout the entire supply chain.
To meet these requirements, the following principles have been used as guidelines during the course of the study:
Existing bar code based blood bank and transfusion systems, must be augmented vs. replacing them
Our Consortium is following a four-phase approach for research, development, and deployment of an RFID-enabled blood product tracking solution across the entire transfusion supply chain. This approach, developed by the University of Wisconsin RFID Lab, is based on research of best practices for systems design and implementation, and has been successfully applied in the context of RFID applications in several industries.
Contact us at: info@transfusionmedicinerfid.org 
