Hello from San Antonio. I'm new to the BBT community and have been reading a while and think this is a wonderful tool! My question today is, at my facility, we are still using manual transfusion record cards. All this information is adequately stored in Meditech (which we have been using forever!). The current lead tech has been hesitant to "cut the umbilical cord". We are the only facility of 5 that has not phased out the cards. The others phased them out more than 5 years ago.

1) Is it necessary to manually enter the many years of blood bank history into meditech before we can phase out it's use. Because we have been doing it concurrently for over 5 years, most of our patients histories are already there!

2)Can we just leave the cards in place for, say, 2 years for records checks and then move them offsite.

I'd like to know how others have done it.

Thanks,

James

I did the same thing a few years ago when we got Meditech. The only thing off of the cards I entered in were patients with known antibodies or other transfusion issues. Just manually enter the patients that aren't already in the system, then stick the cards in storage. You won't miss 'em.:cool:

Ditto! When we went live with Meditech, we never used cards again, except for downtime. We entered antibodies, problems, etc into the system.

We reviewed the card file for historical types. (We haven't moved the card file out so we still pull a historical type out from time to time.) I don't think you need to check ABO/Rh records beyond one year.

It seems like having both a manual record and computer record it seems like a big waste of time as well as potential for errors.

Linda Frederick

When we moved from manual paper processes to our first BB computer system 15 years ago we only entered the patients with antibodies.

If you have been doing Meditech and cards for 5 years I agree, d/c using the cards, you will be amazed how much time you save.

thanks for all your replies. Since we have been doing both concurrently for more than 5 years, all our antibody patient histories are already entered. I think I just needed some outside influences to help convince my managers to "cut the umbilical cord";)

James

For those of you who have totally discontinued using the cards, do you have another backup system to check patient history during a computer downtime?

We use Meditech, and the system automatically backs up the historical file to a local hard drive. If the network or computer goes down, we can access it as an off-line PC.

If the computer, network and local PC is down, we have a total electrical disaster and we couldn't do any bench work anyway ...

at my system, we do the the BLOOD TYPE/AB report and instead of printing, download it to the desktop of a computer that everyone has access to. The cards will remain in the blood bank for another year so they can always refer to it.

With Cerner you can download the patient history to a PC as well on a daily basis. We have been using the BB module for 10 years and no longer have the cards in the lab.

Cerner Classic or Milleninum?