August 22, 2006
Mississippi Blood Services RFID Trial
Mississippi Blood Services is using RFID for inventory management and other purposes. The organization recently completed a trial run, using equipment from Texas Instruments,as a test to replace their current manual procedure of scanning bar codes on blood bags while under sub-freezing temperatures. [via RFID Solutions Online, Mississippi Business Journal]
The manual procedure puts a bag of blood through three steps that could take hours before the bag ships. So RFID is a boon in this scenario, automating the procedure, saving time, and reducing the chances that the blood is unusable. The MBS indicates that despite the reduction in labor, jobs are not being cut back.
MBS is not the first healthcare-related organization to use RFID for tracking blood. The Saarbruecken Clinic in Germany and the Ospedale Maggiore in Bologna, Italy are doing so as well. Such a use of RFID should be widespread, and might help prevent future nightmare situations like the tainted blood scandal that Canadian Red Cross went through not so long ago.
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