Kathyang

The other hospitals in our system do not require a current specimen. We don't do it at our hospital. I worry since I have seen it too often someone using a relative's Health Insurance Card and having a complete different type. We don't need a specimen though form 3 days. If they have had a specimen during the stay, we will thaw plasma.

At my main job we still use bands. At my second job, we don't. If you do 2 types on the patient with 2 different specimens, two different nurses or phlebotomist drawing, and using positive patient ID, it should cover it. I still like bands. At my one job we use Epic with SoftBank for Blood Bank. At the other job, we have Cerner. They both have positive patient ID. Can nurses be trusted with just PPID. I don't trust that since on my second job I have the heme person come over for me to type specimens since the answers were really different. Supposedly they both use PPID but they were 2 different ABO/Rh when I typed it for them. SO do I trust nurses, not really.

In the AABB Manual, it still suggests that the speed and times check be completed quarterly and the function yearly. This is on page 29 in the Technical Manual. This is what we still follow.

Thanks David

We do DTT treatment of our screening cells on our Darzalex patients. I was wondering how people bill for this. Is there a CPT code for this?

We do the cells with the @ behind it since a RhoGam D is not a clinically significant antibody. We also make sure the patient received RhoGam before found this short panel.

We have a small Helmer platelet incubator. It holds 5 apheresis platelets. It is the i series and is a counter top. We are also a small hospital and we keep on platelet at all times.

We have SoftBank and yes I like the system. It has taken some work to get them to communicate correctly. It will be an ongoing process for any BB system to work well with Epic.

We have all of the units listed as you mention above in the Blood Bank system but the Dr's only see the 4 main categories. If they want anything special in the unit (irradiated, washed, etc.) they have to use a special comment. This way they don't get mixed up on which product to select.

Yes. We have been using Epic/ Softbank for 2 years now.

We use saline just to make sure they aren't just agglutinating.

I have procedures for the Ortho Workstation. I am not sure if Ortho comes and trains or not. We had the MTS stations before the Ortho workstation. You will need some kind of fluke thermometer to take the temp since it only tells you if it is heated or not. There is no temperature gauge. If you never have used gel before they may train you on it. Don't but the big rack, it takes up a lot of space and the boxes that the gel cards come in works well. I will attach the workstation procedure. If you want any other procedures for gel let me know.BB4-24 Ortho Workstation ver.1.doc If you want our validaton I can also attach it, just let me know about that too.

Just for knowledge, my mother-in-law had 6 Rh positive kids and she was Rh- Negative. There was no RhoGam back then. She came in later to have surgery and still had no Anti-D. She was not weak D positive either.

We treat the OR patient like any other patient that gets blood. They can ask for an emergency release but we still require them to bring a piece of paper with patient's name, medical record number, date of birth, and Blood Bank ID if the patient has a BBID wrist band. They may bring a chart sticker down to get blood since it has all but the BBID number on it. The BBID number must be written on the piece of paper. They don't always like this process but we need to know which patient since they will probably have more than one patient. It is our way to cover for legality purposes.

I don't know that it is a regulation but studies have proved after 12 hours people start making more mistakes. We saw this with a tech who worked 14 hours in a Blood Bank where I previously worked. We could see by the work that was done in those last 2 hours. Also sometimes the work that needed completed but wasn't.