Radio frequency identification technology, or RFID, has inspired many novel applications of late, including efforts to study magazine reader patterns, access restricted areas, locate stolen vehicles and track luggage at major airports.
A new application under investigation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison would further expand the RFID frontier into a vital health-care concern: Ensuring the safety and quality of the nation's donor blood supply.
The UW-Madison RFID Lab, based in the College of Engineering, 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.
Alfonso Gutierrez, UW-Madison's RFID lab director, says the project began three years ago when Rodeina Davis, CIO of the Milwaukee-based Blood-Center of Wisconsin (BCW), inquired about whether RFID technology could be an upgrade over the current use of bar codes to track blood. BCW became the first of three partners in the research study, joined by Carter Blood Care in Dallas and Mississippi Blood Services in Jackson, Miss. Collectively, these three centers collect more than 500,000 blood donations annually.
"The major driver of this project is improving patient safety by providing greater assurances of giving the right blood to the right people," says Gutierrez. "Blood products are also susceptible to many conditions, such as age, temperature and human error, that can nullify their medical value. We are looking at supply chain improvements that will lead to better safety and quality, and also achieve efficiencies that would pay for the technology."
Davis says bar-coding technology 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," Davis says.
Adds Gutierrez: "This is a project that takes into account the entire supply chain - as we say, 'from vein to vein.'" The intent is to find the "pain points" that can lead to human or system errors and use RFID in a way that properly aligns the technology with the real problems.
Blood transfusion errors remain a concern in heath care. Gutierrez cited a 2005 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report of 1,322 national medical treatment centers that together reported more than 32,000 transfusion-related adverse reactions during the 2004 year. That number is not statistically large compared to the estimated 25 million transfusions that are performed each year, he says, but any mistake can be significant in matters of patient safety. The most common mistakes included sample errors, handling mistakes in the lab, labeling problems and improper storage.
Engineering and business Professor Raj Veeramani, director of the UW-Madison E-Business Consortium that hosts the RFID research effort, says that while the team is developing its prototype RFID system for the blood bank environment, it is also beginning work on the hospital end of the study. Along with BCW's Davis, Veeramani is the campus principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health grant that will support a partnership with several hospitals, including the University of Iowa Medical School and Mississippi Baptist Health.