The nation’s blood product supply chain is a critical pillar of our public health infrastructure. The Institute of Medicine and other leading organizations have highlighted the high incidence of medical errors that results in between 44,000 to 98,000 American deaths each year. A subset of these incidents relates to mis-transfusion: the wrong blood being given to the wrong patient. Despite bar coding and other patient safety-oriented processes and procedures, these incidents persist. Healthcare reform will continue to put tremendous pressure on blood centers and hospitals to control costs, justify expenses, and tighten review of clinical outcomes from activities such as transfusion.

Our study team recognizes that inclusion of RFID technology in the blood supply chain can improve efficiency and quality, reduce costs, and reduce medical errors and enhance patient safety on the transfusion services side.This project aims to enhance the safety, quality, productivity and responsiveness of our nation's blood supply through research, development, and pilot of an innovative application of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology for accurate identification, tracking, and status monitoring of blood and blood products through the entire transfusion medicine supply chain (including collection, manufacturing, distribution, and transfusion).

This project addresses one of the national priorities of the US Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health, and will help in:

• Reducing the number of mortalities due to transfusion medical errors.
• Increasing the cost–effectiveness of the blood product supply chain with enhanced efficiency and productivity.

The solution envisioned (as a result of this study) will support automated check in of collections, eliminate errors during release / receipt of containers, and provide granular visibility of products as they flow through the blood supply chain - from the donor site to the blood center, all the way up to the point of patient care as depicted below.