Wondering what systems are used in the Blood Bank, Lab, and Hospital.

Hospital and Lab are using HBOC Star. (Lab is getting ready to look for a new system).

Blood Bank is using Mediware LifeLine

We use MediWare Hemocare in the blood bank . The hospital system is CPSI.

We have used Hemocare for 6+ years. It's windows based and very user friendly. I work in a large multisite AABB Reference lab and we also are the transfuion service for some hospitals and dialysis units.

We use Cerner Pathnet Millennium for the lab. Hospitals use HBOC and SMS. We are a multisites (7 sites ) system.

We currently use Mediware Lifeline for both Transfusion Service and Donor Services. We will be purchasing a new system soon (decision to be made in 1-2 weeks). We have narrowed our decision down to Mediware (HCLL for the Transfusion Service; LifeTrak for Donor Services) or Wyndgate (SafeTrace-TX for Transfusion Service; SafeTrace for Donor Services). Any advice out there? Pros or cons?? Thanks.

Terry Anderson

LIS is Mysis. Transfusion Service is Life LIne/Western Star. We start application training and builder training to install the new Mediware product HCLL on March 29th. Wish us luck, we'll need it. The system will serve 20+ hospitals from 500 beds down to <20 beds within the corporation. Everything is expected to be standardized throughout. I fear my doom is near. :cry:

Our LIS and Blood Bank all use Misys. We went live last year and have been quite pleased. We are looking forward to the new version of Misys blood bank possibly next year.

Our LIS is Pathlab (Cerner Millenium is our Projected new system- go live in May05), Our Blood Bank is in the process of Building Wyndgate- go live in Nov04, to be interfaced with Star/Caremanager until future interface with Cerner (2yrs...). Cerner is possible through out hospital within a couple years(currently HBOC)

The LIS for our facilities is Cerner Pathnet "Classic". We will most likely upgrade to the Millenium version soon, since Classic will not be supported by Cerner in a few short years.

Our HIS is LastWord (not the Lab's choice).

We currently use Mediware Lifeline for both Transfusion Service and Donor Services. We will be purchasing a new system soon (decision to be made in 1-2 weeks). We have narrowed our decision down to Mediware (HCLL for the Transfusion Service; LifeTrak for Donor Services) or Wyndgate (SafeTrace-TX for Transfusion Service; SafeTrace for Donor Services). Any advice out there? Pros or cons?? Thanks.

Terry Anderson

Hi Terry,

We too had narrowed it down to Mediware and Wyndgate. Ultimately we selected Mediware. We begin Super USer training next Monday!

While we found both products to be very good, there were a few small things that made us lean toward Mediware. They have a terrific report prebuilt for their inventory. Wyndgate said they'd make one just like it. Mediware also has a lot of prebuilt reports, Wyndgate said we could easily build them using Crystal Reports. While that may or not may be true, I like the idea of the reports being prebuilt.

THe one site survey we did for Wyndgate was not impressive. The end users seemed very unsure of how the system worked and that made us very uncomfortable.

We've been using Misys (formerly Sunquest) since 1985 in the whole lab. We are currently on version 5.3, though I am looking forward to version 6.0 in the coming year, mainly because we need interfacing for automation. I like many of Misys' features, though I do wish for LIS support that really understands both the system and the BB.

At the present time we are using Hemocare in Blood Bank for last 3 yrs, interfaced with HBO Star for Hospital system. Hemocare has been fine for BB but rest of Hospital finds it difficult to retrieve information. Our Hospital is changing the HIS and looking at Quadramed for HIS and SoftLab and Soft Bank. We saw a demo for SoftBank and it seemed ok. Does anyone out there use this system or know something about these systems?

While I personally like Hemocare, it is being sunsetted next year, as I expect you know. I am marginally familiar with softbank but know a few users who really like it. You probably won' t go wrong going with it . . . it will just be different. Good luck.

We're another Mediware Lifeline user that is moving to Mediware HCLL and Lifetrack.

We switched from Meditech LIS to Cerner Classic 3 years ago (not our choice). Meditech was a good system. Cerner classic leaves much to be desired. I would not recommend it. If you do not have someone trained in their report writing so that you can customize reports and other functions it is terrible. HIS is SMS.

We use Meditech for all: BB, Lab, Micro, Hospital, etc. We have 4 off site hospitals and lots of doctor offices all set up to integrate. I like the system although it's not as user-friendly as some.

We are presently a Hemocare user. We have MYSIS as our LIS and Invision as our HIS. We have a transfusion service, a donor service, apheresis service and also collect stem cells. We originally had Sunquest as our blood bank system but as we use lab assistants who thaw and pool products but do not do any patietn/unit/donor testing, Sunquest could not separate security functions and we were cited by FDA.

While we are currently using Hemocare, there are several issues with this system. It does not interface very well with Mysis and Invision as the results ultimately have to go through 2 interfaces. We do not care for the service that Hemocare has recently provided us with especially since they had some issues with a FDA inspection. While we were negotiating upgrading the system to meet their FDA corrective action, their compliance /quality assurance dept. were not in synch with their sales force/technical services force, often resulting in mixed messages or to be blunt not knowing what the other hand was communicating to us. We found them to be very arrogant and unreasonable, but were forced to comply as they threatened and actually pulled our license for a short time. (we actually had FDA inspector approval to stay a a lowere version while we were looking at other systems). Anyway, I digress. We also have an issue with their automated back up system. We bought this system and when we tried to put it in their were little to no instructions on how to physically hook it up, and what was neede to place it into service including what validation to use. Again another service related issue.

I have been exposed to the HCLL product and think that it is very nice, but again our recent experiences with Mediware has slightly soured us on this company.

We had contracted with MYSIS for their blood bank package 6.0 but the contract had expired and they still haven't received 510K approval yet. Target date is not 12/04 (yeah I've heard that before). Not sure if they will be able to interface automation yet, which makes me feel hesitant.

6 years ago, the hospital system I was employed went over to Soft Lab and I did see the Soft Bank system. Was there in Tampa when they were 510 K approved. At that time the donor package was in its infancy and not available. I was pleased with there service.

I guess we have to look at both the computer system itself and the service (Technical Service, Sales service, quality assurance and validation service) provided by the computer company itself.

By the way is it me or does it seem like an oxymoron to have a blood bank computer company provide its own validation services. The whole pupose of a validation is to try to break the system. To expose the systems faults. This validation service provided by the blood bank system company has an inherent confict of interest. But thats just my opinion.

Currently we are Mediware - LifeLine but may be going to either SoftBank or Horizon Blood Bank (Wyngate)

We are a computer validation company and have worked on all the major vendors. Please contact me if you would like insight on the systems. Gregory Francis, Korchek Technologies, 877-KOR-CHEK. greg@korchek.com

Inova of Northern Virginia (my moonlighting Med Tech job) uses the Cerner system. Complaints are few, but most folks there have a relatively low expectation of the systems that Inova purchases.

Rich