"We came up with a blueprint of what an RFID-enabled process would look like at every stage in the supply chain."Īnother key for UW-Madison RFID Lab was validating the business case for RFID adoption, researchers say. "The system developed by the Transfusion Medicine RFID Consortium is the very first end-to-end solution to the entire supply chain of transfusion medicine, from collection through blood centers to hospitals," said Veeramani in a statement. Since the integrity of the blood supply is so critical to quality healthcare, the expectation is that RFID tracking will help reduce common safety errors. "Blood is a highly-regulated substance and needs to be accounted for throughout the entire distribution process." "The big advantage will be elevating the visibility of the blood product, where you can very clearly track where it came from, and where it's going," said Gutierrez in a statement.
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Researchers, led by UW-Madison RFID Lab Director Alfonso Gutierrez, also investigated the reliability and efficiency of the technology in a process that today requires manual identification and troubleshooting, RFID will enable the health care industry to re-engineer the blood supply chain processes with greater automated controls.
"For RFID to be adopted across the industry, the safety of its use on blood was a fundamental question to be answered," said Raj Veeramani, professor of industrial and systems engineering and executive director of the UW E-Business Institute, in a press statement. The UW-Madison team conducted tests to validate the safety of RFID technology with the blood supply, demonstrating no adverse impacts, such as temperature or biochemical changes.
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iTrace software is now available for use in the nation's blood centers, and it's hoped that with further FDA approval it will be rolled out in hospitals nationwide. RFID technology is often used for tracking the movement and status of products, but this is the first FDA-approved application involving blood products in healthcare, researchers say. Together, they researched, designed, developed and tested a new RFID-enabled solution called iTrace for Blood Centers, which will automatically identify, reconcile and track blood products. The lab was one of three lead Wisconsin partners in the project, along with the BloodCenter of Wisconsin and SysLogic Inc., a Milwaukee-based information systems firm. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison RFID Lab, who have been working on the the project for six years, say the tool is the first of its kind to get FDA approval. The Food and Drug Administration has given clearance to radio frequency identification technology to track the safety and efficiency of the nation's blood supply.
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