BIOS: Technology Means Business

New measures to improve the safety of blood transfusions, including an electronic tracking system for patients and blood, are announced today by the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA).

The NPSA has worked with Serious Hazards of Transfusion (SHOT) and the Chief Medical Officer’s National Blood Transfusion Committee (NBTC) on a ‘Right patient, right blood’ project to develop and evaluate new safety strategies.

Professor Sir John Lilleyman, Medical Director at the NPSA said: “The IT recommendation relates to the electronic tracking system for patients and blood. A key point in today’s launch is the issue of an outline specification for an Electronic Clinical Transfusion Management System (ECTMS).”

This national specification has been developed with the following objectives: to address the patient safety risks in the transfusion process; to identify IT requirements for a blood tracking system; to provide an initial specification for IT suppliers; to provide an initial specification that can be extended to cover other clinical tracking operations.

The ECTMS specification focuses on the steps in the blood transfusion pathway, and has been based on a widely-used Software Requirements Specification template. The document does not yet provide sufficient detail for IT suppliers to develop the systems and software required for a complete solution, but it does give an overall context of the development, and offers a user’s perspective of the system by way of ‘use case’ modelling processes based largely on the Unified Modelling Language (UML). These ‘use cases’ describe all the possible scenarios in each stage of the entire blood transfusion process.

The ECTMS will be more than just a software solution, as it will be required to integrate with server hardware, client devices and remote terminals. The specification recognises this and builds on the experience of current users of information technology in relation to blood transfusion. The document specifies over 40 functional and non-functional requirements, and is endorsed by Connecting for Health (CfH) and Informing Healthcare in Wales.

The scope of the specification includes the automated tracking of blood products from ‘vein to vein’, including the initial ordering of a blood transfusion for a patient, through the taking of a blood sample for cross-matching, to administration of the blood transfusion. The document incorporates the traceability requirements of the Blood Safety and Quality Regulations 2005.

Professor Sir John Lilleyman said: “Our proposed blood tracking system presents a number of challenges to the IT world. Foremost among these is the overriding need to ensure that the right patient received the right blood. “Blood transfusions involve a complex sequence of activities. Our vision for the ECTMS is of an innovative system that can make use of either bar code technology or Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to eliminate errors during each stage in the chain of events. We are confident that, working with the leading providers of IT services, we can deliver a solution that will make significant improvements to NHS organisations delivering blood transfusions.”

Starting in March 2007, CfH, with the support of the NPSA, will carry out a pilot with one or more acute healthcare organisations to test how this is implemented.

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