Hi,

My friend and I are making an assignment about problems during donor-blood transport, mainly in the hospital.

We have a few questions I hope someone can help us with.

What are the known problems during the transport of blood in the hospitals.

what is the optimal blood temperature of the blood during storage? (what is max acceptable?) and how is this during transport outside coolers?

does anyone know where RFID tracking helped smoothen the blood transport in hospitals?

thanks in advance

RFID is not yet approved for use with Blood Products. So you will not get much response on that question. The FDA permits blood to be stored between 1-10 Deg C in transit, but requires storage to be between 1-6 Deg C with documentation of the storage temperature every 4 hours. Some hospitals use coolers, some use remote refrigerators or, in our case, we use portable refrigerators and data loggers rather than coolers and ice.

I hope this is a start toward getting your answers.

Franklyn, I'm curious, what do you mean by "RFID is not yet approved for use with Blood Products."?

What's to approve? You put the transmitter on the cooler and you can track the cooler. If you apply the RFID devise to the bood bag then the concern about sticking something to the bag comes up but that is not unique to RFID.

Check out www.aabb.org for more info.

Their homepage this week happens to have a whole article on RFID. Good Luck.

The FDA has not licensed RFID for use with blood products at this time. They (the FDA) is concerned that repeat exposure to the radio frequencies used "could" adversely affect the product. There was a great lecture on the topic at the AABB Conf in California last October that I was able to attend.

Testing is currently underway to get FDA approval, but the issue isn't the adhesive, the issue is the high frequency signals that the products will be scanned with while in use with RFID. IF guess the FDA Luddites imagine a sort of hand held microwave emitter is used with RFID and would "cook" the products.

The Blood Center in Wisconsin is doing a study on RFID and have started publishing their results. http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/3604/1/1/

Dr. Sandler at Georgetown University also did a study on it but found that they couldn't recoup the costs yet so it might not be feasible. http://www.ilabb.org/Presentations/Administration_of_Blood/Dr.%20Sandler%20RFID%20Technology.pdf