Radio frequency identification technology, or RFID, has inspired many novel applications including tracking magazine reader patterns, accessing restricted areas, locating stolen vehicles, and tracking luggage at major airports. A new application under investigation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison would further expand the RFID frontier into ensuring the safety and quality of the nation’s donor blood supply. The UW-Madison RFID Lab has partnered with three national blood centers to study the feasibility and develop prototypes for using RFID to manage the entire supply chain in blood transfusion medicine. The team has already completed feasibility studies related to safety and economic benefits, and is in the process of testing a prototype RFID system to identify, track and monitor the condition of blood products. Developers hope the technology will be an affordable improvement over existing bar code technology, which is restricted to line-of-sight, unit-by-unit readings, and is of no use when bar-coded materials are in sealed boxes. “With the ongoing volume of shipments to hospitals every day and the quality checks required, being able to read multiple items simultaneously, without a line-of-sight restriction, can improve efficiency and enable faster reaction times,” said Rodeina Davis, CIO for one of the partnering blood centers in Milwaukee. UW-Madison is also collaborating with hospitals and Brookfield, WI-based technology firm Syslogic, which will identify some of the problems that lead to transfusion errors in the hospital environment and help address those issues using RFID-enabled products. An economic analysis already completed by the research team focused on savings for blood centers. Disposing of donated blood due to mishandling or other concerns costs more than $200 per unit, and a typical mid-sized blood center may need to discard 15,000 to 20,000 units each year. By improving the identification and quality control through RFID, the researchers estimated it could save the blood banking industry more than $9 million per year after full implementation and result in 40,000 to 45,000 fewer units of blood products being discarded. Alfonso Gutierrez, UW-Madison’s RFID lab director, says RFID has huge potential in health care beyond the blood tracking application. For example, the UW-Madison team is starting to assess RFID as a way to better monitor and maintain “mobile assets” in hospitals, such as IV pumps and other devices that doctors move from patient to patient. RFID would not only identify their locations across the hospital, but the technology can also notify users when maintenance is needed, he says. Go to: University of Wisconsin

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