We are in the process of building our Meditech 6.16 system and I have a couple of questions for those of you who have already been through this.  I heard the following from a site that recently went live:  "...you cannot look up a unit of blood by number and see which patient got that unit.  It makes look backs for the Red Cross very, very difficult."  Is this true?

Thanks in advance

No that is not true, at least in my Hospital.  Each unit is entered (can be scanned) into inventory upon receipt and everything that happens to that unit such as a retype, crossmatched to whom, issued to whom, returned to stock, re-issue, transfusion, etc. file to the unit record. There is an option for BBk unit inquiry, key in the DIN and all the info is there.  Look backs couldn't be easier. 

We have had Meditech for 11 years and never had a problem looking up a unit history.  That is aslong as my fingers can type in the number correctly !

Thanks LAS!  We have been on Meditech for 10 years and I couldn't imagine that this would change.  This really makes me wonder what this person was talking about.

I review units every day, looking them up in Meditech could not be easier

We have been on Meditech Magic and Client Server since 1995. When you perform the unit inquiry you can see the patient for whom the unit was issued out to. Inquiry tracks everything and each patient the unit was crossmatched to.

Our last Meditech revision was to 5.6.7 and there was no change to unit lookups.  Meditech 6.whatever is a long way ahead of that, but I don't understand why they would change such a long-standing, NECESSARY part of the Blood Bank system.  Please keep us informed on this subject if you discover this is a real change and not just a new version Glitch they have to fix before Go-live.