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 (roughly grouped by similar antigens the tech at the time 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? 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.

Sounds like a good student project for someone taking a database course, including entering all the data from the cards. Other idea is to scan the cards with OCR capibility. If the cards are set up the same, it should work.

We assigned a location to each unit using the freezer number, bin number and location number. Example: 33-T2-8 is freezer 33, second bin on the top, position 8. The location can be added as a memo in ST. Of course, this means someone has to update the memo if the unit is moved. The ST antigen search function is not as good as it could be. We finally asked our IT to write a program that would search, retrieve and record the phenotypes from ST as well as the expiration dates; didn't think to ask them to retrieve the location as well. The tech can use the phenotype and expiration date to choose a unit. You may want to think about auditing the inventory periodically (annually?) and making sure that the location has been updated no matter what system you ultimately choose.