hi

I work in the National Blood Bank of Costa Rica, Central America.

We don´t have any software system, so all our work and documentation are perfomanced manually.

I´ll like to read about some of ur experiences with software, recomendations, good and not good points about particular options.

We have an extremelly urgency, adquiering one, so a comertial option will be probably our better choise.

In my country, two Hospital Blood Banks use "DELFIN", and Abbot propouse me "Blood Bank Soft".

Please, let me know about more options and ur oppinion about them!

Another issue i´ll like to expose is the use of quality control software in blood Bank?

Does any one use it?

Which option do u have?

We use SafeTrace TX and love it. We were never computerized in blood bank and with SafeTrace being windows based (as was our homegrown LIS system) the transition was easy. Anyone that could work a computer at home could feel comfortable with it. It's parent company is Wyndgate out of California. There is a QC module so you can record QC but at this time it doesn't function as a check - that's for future versions..... There also is a donor side to this (SafeTrace) so if you also are a donor center you could track vein to vein (sort of Wyndgate's motto). Good luck!

I like SafeTrace also. I find them to be responsive to their customers requests and needs.

We use Blood Bank Computer System. It's a preaty good system, and for a smaller blood bank it's more affordable.

We will be starting to implement our new blood bank system on Aug 24th. We are going from Hemicare which we have used for 3 years to Horizon(SafeTRace TX-Wyndgate) any suggestions that might help I have only seen a 20 minute web based demo.

For a blood bank looking to purchase a single copy of SafeTrace from Wyndgate, what is the approximate cost? (Upfront, maintenance, etc)??

For anyone going to AABB in Miami in October, Wyndgate always has a really nice area at TXPO. Prospective customers can test drive whatever product they are looking at and current customers can chat with high level Wyndgate people who can offer solutions or look at implementing ideas.

I don't know about the demo. We went live in April, 2003. When we purchased SafeTrace we had an intense training period as part of the deal. We opted for onsite training and our trainer was excellent. We've had awesome tech support ever since.

Our purchase price would probably be considered proprietary at my establishment but there are multiple levels of involvement each with its own price. So, you would have to decide what you would need the Wyndgate people to do and what you could handle with your own IT people. Bottom line the price is pretty customized.

There is a simple and affordable FDA approved Transfusion Module that is delivered via a hosted/web-deployed method. It's designed for small blood banks facing all the new ISBT128 regs, that are not computerized, or don't think they can justify the cost and complexity of most available systems, and only want/need something more basic. Web-deployment makes it easy to implement and own.

It provides Inventory Management/Tracking, Online Patient Histories and Type/Screen/XM worksheets, and Standard and User-definable Management Reports. It also generates labels for pooled, split, etc.. components. Again, it doesn't provide all the "fool-proof" bells and whistles, but it seems very well suited to those labs that need to get off a paper system very affordably. There are many labs out there that fit this bill, that can't spend $75-$100K+ for a system.

It's called SBB (Simple Blood Bank) from Psyche Systems Corporation (http://www.psychesystems.com/sbbhome.htm). They're a best-of-breed LIS vendor with this nice little add-on.

there are a number of different off the shelf products for quality management that are 21 CFR Part 11 compliant. two that I know work well are Master Control www.mastercontrol.com and TrackWise www.sparta-systems.com.

I implemented the blood bank computer system in our hospital 2yrs ago coming from a non computerized blood bank. It's called Soft Computer and it's interfaced with a different computer system running our LIS called Mckessen. I went for a week of training and able to retrain all our staff myself. The system is user friendly and easy to learn.Although, I'm not a computer savy, I did the validation of the system for the blood bank for a couple of months and went Live with no major problem. The good thing I like about it is the flexibility of modifying you own procedure and they have great programmers that helps you thru. They have this system called TMS where you can exchange e mail using the assigned TMS task # and communicate with their customers service and programmers like going into a chat room.

It's great and I don't have any bad issue about their system.

Norma Macalintal

Health Central Hospital

Blood Bank Supervisor

We used Soft Computer for several years and the only time it was down was for updates. We were very pleased with it and would recommend it. If you had a service issue, it was fixed in a short time period.

We are on Meditech Client Server since 2001 as the hospital went with a system wide LIS system. We still have issues from go live that haven't been taken care of. I won't recommend it.

We went live with Soft four months ago after using Sunquest (formerly Misys) for 16 years. Our lab is still Sunquest but we did not feel their Blood Bank application had kept up with the times. We are very pleased with Softbank. It has so much more functionality than Sunquest has and as others have mentioned it is quite flexible. We also have the ability to print ISBT-128 labels from within SoftBank. The training we received was excellent.

We had contacted Wyndgate about SafeTrace Tx but they told us they could not deal directly with us so we had to go through McKesson (Horizon Blood Bank). It looked to be a good system as well but McKesson didn't seem too interested in selling us just Blood Bank without the full Horizon laboratory system.

I think Soft was the best choice for us.