swede

That is very interesting. Our service person said he used to fix them, but he has now been told that he has to tell us to order the bottle for $580.00!

Has anyone with a ProVue been told that the bottles for the rinse solutions A and B are consumables? Ours broke the other day (at the coupling) and we had to order one at a riduculous price because it is now considered a "consumable". Interesting....... what are your thoughts? I figure if I am told to just rinse it weekly and bleach it monthly, it is reusable and replaceable, not consumable!

yes, it is possible. Our product orders automatically add to the type and screen for 72 hours. I am not exactly sure how it works, but it is possible. We are currently on Client Server, but we used Magic for many years and the product orders added onto the type screen.

We handle it pretty much the same way. If they call and ask if blood is available, we always say yes, if the screen is complete. If they ask how many are ready, we ask them how many did they want! Nurses and doctors just don't get it no matter how many times we try to explain it to them. A couple of the surgeons and anesthesiologists are starting to catch on.

We have been using this method for several years now, every since our reference laboratory suggested it to us. We no longer do adsorptions; if we need to, we will be sending them out since we no longer have the reagents on hand to perform one. We have found the occassional underlying anti-E or anti-K by using this method.

We are using Ortho's fetal screen II. We have had no problems so far. When we first went with it, we continued to run the Immucor test as well (until our contract ran out). We had no problems between the two. Our main reason for switching was cost.

Susan is correct, it is a complete blood count

We had this problem a lot too, however, since we went live on the Provue, we have not seen the problem. I believe that keeping the cells out of the light and refrigerated as much as possible is a good solution. The provue is dark inside and we switch out reagents every shift. So, try keeping the cells covered and put them away as much as possible.

They are spendy, but we love our BioHit pipets for working with Gel. We have one tipmaster, but no one uses it anymore. Ortho now has a "pipet doctor" that you can send your biohit into for a quote on repair and if acceptable, they will repair it. We just recently sent one of ours in for repair, and surprisingly it was inexpensive in the scheme of things!

Can the 72 hours be extended? We currently draw our pre-admission surgical patients up to 3 weeks prior to surgery. We do not redraw them when they are admitted. Would we be able to use these specimens for the EXM in client server? We have been using a "home grown" electronic crossmatch with Meditech for many years (and we did get our procedure approved by FDA), but we have not changed to the Meditech provided software yet. Our biggest question is the 72 hour rule.

We do not pre-apply the monitors to our units. We apply them at the time of issue. We keep them in the refrigerator just like we used to with the 1-10 monitors. We have a tray of cooler packs that we take out and place on the counter. We keep the units on the cooler packs while we apply one monitor at a time. Then we immediately place the units in the cooler or in a transport box (with a cooler pack for transfer to an OR refrigerator). Blood either remains in a cooler (in ED or in L&D) or goes in a rubbermaid box with a cooler pack straight to the OR monitored refrigerator. We validated this method and have had very little trouble with the monitors turning red; we too thought they would be very touchy, but they have turned out not to be. Good luck!

We require one type per admission for FFP. Cryo and platelets require a historical type.

The ProVue does allow a card to be reused if it is still closed. As long as the foil has not been removed, the card is good until its expiration. QC works on these cards, and we have never seen a problem with reincubating cards.....we have been on manual gel for 9 years.....we just started using our ProVue and have seen no problems so far.

Our outpatient OB docs have us draw an antibody screen and administer the rhogam before the screen is complete. We do a quick type to make sure the lady is truly rh negative, but the screen is done later in the day. The path and the docs decided the convenience to the patient was the most important thing. We have followed this practice for many many years. Some offices administer their own Rhogam, but send the antibody screen to us. Some offices send us the screen and give the rhogam themselves a week later.

Wow! Am I glad that I clicked on this thread. This sounds like a very helpful tool, especially for the inexperienced, over burdened PM and night shifts. I am going to check into this; I'm hoping IS will clear the way for us to add this software to our computer.....the price is within "no approval needed" range....so IS is my only barrier. Thanks for the info!

If the baby is A or B and the mom is O with a negative Ab screen, we simply report "Mom is type O, her Ab screen is negative, this is a probable ABO incompatibility." The docs came up with this years and years ago, and they are still content with the report. If we need to do an eluate of any kind, we use Immucor Elu kit and run it against panel cells and A and B cells. We perform our eluates in Gel, so they do not require much sample.

We are currently working out the contract to get the Provue.....we are hoping to get it up and running by the end of the year. Are you using ProVue? If so, how do you like it?

We currently perform all of our antiglobulin antigen typing using the IgG gel cards. We use 50ul of 0.8 cells and 25ul of the antisera, we have been doing this for 8 years now with no problems. We are currently validating the monoclonals using buffered gel cards. So far so good. The only ones that we will continue do in tube will be M and N.

We result these antibodies as "probably passive anti-D" and comment with the date of the last Rhogam injection. We still use the electronic crossmatch since the antibody is not clinically significant.

The MR number does not change between sites. We have a system for matching/verifying MR numbers, etc. The type and screen information goes into a shared history file. We don't have a problem with checking history, etc. We have decided that the policy is to retype and rescreen the patient on arrival. Thank you!

Brenda, we just received some safety vu-6 to try out. We are also scratching our heads with this business of having to put them on the blood an hour before activation. We are trying to figure out a way around this because we rarely know an hour ahead of the time that blood will be going in the coolers. We also send blood to a monitored refrigerator in the OR, but we have to use the monitors on units there because OR cannot always be trusted to leave the units in the frig. We willl be using the cold packs while we issue. One of my techs is going to call Williams lab and see what they have for suggestions and maybe reasons why these monitors are treated so differently than the 10's Good luck! Judy

We use name and MR#, our outpatients have the same MR number as their inpatient MR number.

I'll have to check the CLIA number, I can't remember off hand how it was set up, I know they are different CAP numbers. Thank you!

We've always wanted to do this, but haven't been brave enough. We have asked if they want it on a stick!

We are the main hospital in the system. We have a small, limited service hospital that is about 10 miles away. They send all the lab work to us that they are unable to perform at their place. They can type/screen and crossmatch, but they do not perform antibody ID. They keep a limited supply of blood because the hospital only has 4 inpatient beds, it is mostly ED and outpatient services. They use the same computer system (meditech client server), but it is set up by site for testing purposes. They had a patient that needed to be transfused before being transferred to our main hospital, then the patient was sent to our place for further transfusion. Should we retype type and screen the patient? We did repeat the type on a tube that was sent with the patient (proper ID, the identifying number is the same within the system). We used the screen results that were entered at the other hospital.....we can't add to the specimen because it is a different site, but we can look up the result and it is in the patient's EMR. We didn't want to delay further transfusion by redoing the antibody screen, but we are thinking we should have done so. Any suggestions? THis is all new to us since the small hospital just opened in March and this was their first transfusion and our first transfer in the middle of transfuson.