Blood Transfusion and Patient Safety with IT – Minimizing risk of transfusion with Point-of-Act-System -

Objectives: The purpose of this study is ensuring patient safety on blood transfusion by minimizing risk of transfusion at the point of care through IT. The targets are ensuring 5 rights of transfusion, rights process and right information by electrical identification and traceability of blood products. Methods: We used Point-of-Act-System (POAS) as a health information system and RFID as device for auto identification and data capturing. The basic concepts of POAS for patient safety are capturing every activity in a hospital, process management to ensure right medication and product management with serialized number by single item level. As a way to secure privacy of blood donor, item management numbers on RFID were rewriting to prevent leakages of donor information. Result: Experimental project with this system was enforced in Iwate, Japan. The system designed based on process analysis and use case of transfusion was successfully implemented in Morioka Red Cross Hospital to prevent medical errors on transfusion and ensure traceability of blood products. By reading RFID at the point of care, the system was possible to check database in blood center to look for adverse events of blood products collected from same donor through Internet within 2 seconds. The system identified all 377 blood products with RFID and acquired tracking data. Discussion: Identification taken by this system is more comprehensive compare to previous efforts, though the time for identification is quite short and effective. The data captured by this system is significantly important for hospital management as well as patient safety and contribute to construct safer and trusted health care system.