T. McIntyre

Cliff - I tried to email a copy of a thread, using thread tools, to a my Pathologist but the program says that I can't used this function. Thanks

Opal - Prior to using this database program I inputted a months worth of units that we had recieved/transferred or transfused. These units formed the base for testing the program for accuracy. This program is strictly for tracking units and the disposition of the components that we recieve. We are able to print out our current inventory which we do on a regular basis. The inventory printout is then compared to what is in the fridge and on the board. Thus we know on a daily basis if our tracking system is working for our recieved products. When units are transfused the information is taken from the hard cards and entered to indicate the patient that received the unit. We still use old fashion hard cards as our primary blood banking record. We used a series of fake patient information to ensure that the system was working correctly. You may want to see the threads on "Homegrown Computer System -Ha" for more information and for a reply from Sheryl Kochman of the Devices Review Branch. Since we do not use this system for patient care, donor selection, interpretative testing, electronic crossmatches or anything but tracking units it is difficult for me to see that this administrative tool would be a medical device, but this may be the case as per Sheryls' remarks.

Sheryl, thank you for your input and the FDA links. We are a small transfusion service that uses this program to track the receipt and disposition of components. We do not rely on this program to select units for transfusion, nor does the program perform any interpretative functions. It is strictly an electronic record of the units that we recieve and the final disposition. We have included patient data, which is manually input from the BB hard cards, so that the final disposition reflects to whom the unit was given.

We track and can trace all units recieved, the disposition of the unit and to whom it was given, etc. We use this system as an adjunct to our HIS and our Blood Banking records. We do not perform electronic crossmatches, we crosscheck blood types with our hard cards, when available. All of our data since 1999 is online and immediatley available to us and is backed up daily by IT services. If there is a product recall, we can locate the unit information quickly. If we want to see if a patient has recieved any previous units by us we can easily find that information. In addition, the query function allows to compile monthly stats which previously had been performed manually and which are not available through the HIS. You may call it useless, to us it is an affordable alternative that has saved us countless hours, and big bucks, since we started using it. We would have liked to have had the top shelf software available but, we made do with what we had available at the time. Currently the system is tracking over 11,000 components that have come through our transfusion service and over 8,000 patients with multiple encounters. The program speaks for itself and the price was right!

Elizabeth, we developed a Microsoft Access program to fufill our needs in our transfusion service. We do not track donors, perform electronic crossmatches or anything that needs to be validated according to NY-DOH. The program tracks the units that we recieve and the disposition of each unit. If you would like more information please contact me at terry.mcintyre@viahealth.org. It is a in house system that we have continued to develope over the past six years and has served us well in terms of unit tracking. Our central hospital has used the Wingate system for several years but the system was never purchased for our smaller rural hospital where we do over a thousand transfusions a year. We needed something that our budget would not support and this alternative has worked well for us. Terry McIntyre, SC(ASCP), MCSE

We use Microsoft Access to track all of our units, from reciept to final disposition. Since we do not have a Blood Bank System (small rural hospital) this has been very helpful for us. The program was developed with currently available software (MS office) and so it did not cost us anything other than the time to develope it, which though substantial has paid for itself over the past five years. We currently have all units recieved and dispensed, unit attributes and patient recipient information on line for the past five years, approx 10,000 units and over 8000 patients. Works for us and the NYS DOH. Terry.McIntyre@viahealth.org