Alison Stace-Naughton with Alfonso Gutierrez and Brad Geiger

Department of Industrial Engineering and the UW RFID Lab, UW-Madison

There is a need to design a safer, more efficient blood supply chain. In transfusion medicine, mistransfusions (mis-match between patient and blood) occur in 1 out of 12,000 transfusions.  Reducing mistransfusions was identified by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institute of Health as a top-20 national priority.

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) in the blood supply chain could provide healthcare entities with a safer and more efficient alternative to tracking blood within the blood supply chain.  As opposed to current barcoding technology which uses light waves, RFID emits radio waves which eliminate line-of-sight requirements and allow simultaneous reads of multiple tags.

Verification of the reliability of RFID throughout the blood supply chain is needed.  This research systematically investigates the reliability of RFID with different container types, tag types, and bag orientations. The methodology involves scanning the bags and simultaneously recording the number of tags read in specified time intervals.

RFID is found to be effective in identifying 100% of the tags as 99.39% of the trials resulted in 100% readability in 60 seconds.  Experimentation showed that 56 out of 60 trials read 100% of the tags on the blood bags in less than 60 seconds, leading the researcher to conclude that RFID is reliable.  This research illustrates that RFID is a strong alternative as it enhances efficiency and reliability, eliminates barriers with barcoding, and meets national healthcare initiatives.