Keeping Track of Frozen Inventory (Rare Units)

[InventoryWizard]

My lab uses Safetrace and Safetrace TX for all crossmatches, cases, and fresh product. However, somehow the way rare frozen units are handled (before being tagged and issued) is stuck in the stone age, and I have been encouraged to "think outside the box" to improve it. TX will let us know a frozen rare unit is available *somewhere* in the lab but finding it is another matter.

They are kept in several ultra-low chest-style freezers with racks and cartridges. To physically find a unit, techs have to thumb through boxes of hundreds of cards; units are roughly grouped by similar antigens the responsible tech considered most important in the card box and freezer. RBCs nearing the 10 year expiration are in their own section to *hopefully* be checked first. Then, they have to hope it is the freezer/ rack/ level the card says it is, which if at any point a freezer went down and they had to be moved, or the appropriate one was full, and no one at the time felt like meticulously replacing all 100 or so units it will not be.

How do other labs handle this? RFID tags? Labels and spreadsheets all over the freezer lids? I'm thinking maybe the best way to go would be a system used in large food warehouses, but don't know of a compatible system. It would be great if I could find something to populate inventory results from TX and link them with the actual locations somehow , but I don't think I'll be allowed to mess with that system.

The best I can think of is some sort of Access or Excel spreadsheet, where you can search by antigens and list results by date order, with the location of the RBC showing after a unit is selected. Then we could simply put units in the freezer by date order, and use the system to find them. The other issue is, since no one is going to manually enter all those cards, I guess we would have to slowly phase out the cards over time, and I'm not sure how to handle that.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Edited December 24, 2011 by InventoryWizard