NPSA issues spec for electronic blood tracking

The National Patient Safety Agency has unveiled new measures to help improve the safety of blood transfusions, including the initial specification for an electronic tracking system to ensure the right patient is matched with the right blood product.

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. The specification is one of a number of recommendations made, another key one being patient ID cards.

Professor 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 the outline specification for an Electronic Clinical Transfusion Management System."

The initial specification for an Electronic Clinical Transfusion Management System (ECTMS) is designed to help automatically match up patients to blood products, and reducing patient safety risks. The specification identifies initial IT requirements for suppliers.

The scope of the specification includes the automated tracking of blood products from ‘vein to vein’, including the initial ordering of blood transfusion for a patient, through to the taking of a blood sample for cross-matching, to administration of the blood transfusion.

Eventually it is intended that ECTMS, which also provides a specification for other clinical tracking operations, could be will make use of technology including bar coding and Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID).

The document specifies over functional and non–functional requirements, and is endorsed by Connecting for Health (CfH) and Informing Healthcare in Wales. NPSA plans, in conjunction with CfH, to pilot the new system at one or more English acute trust in 2007.

Professor 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."

He added: "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 of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to eliminate errors during each stage in the chain of events."

The ECTMS specification focuses on the steps in the blood transfusion pathway, and has been based on a widely-used Software requirements Specification template offering a perspective of the system through a series of ‘use cases’ describing all the possible scenarios in each stage of the blood transfusion process.

The NPSA says that ECTMS builds on the experience of existing users of IT to support blood transfusion processes and recognises the systems will be required to integrate with server hardware, client devices and remote terminals and the document.

Starting in March 2007, CfH backed by the NPSA, will carry out a pilot with one or more acute healthcare organisations to test how the new system will be implemented.