Davenport blood center tracks donations more efficiently

DAVENPORT - A lot happens between the time a blood donation is made and the time it reaches a hospital's doors.

It first has to travel to the donation center, where the red blood cells are separated from the plasma and it undergoes tests for diseases such as West Nile, HIV and hepatitis B and C. The blood type must be confirmed and it then is packed, stored and driven to a hospital.

And things can go wrong along the way.

So after years of tracking its travels by paper forms, the Mississippi Valley Regional Blood Center has created a new, more efficient web-based system that it hopes other blood centers around the country will use, too.

The Chain of Custody system ensures all blood donations and their corresponding testing vials and donor history cards make it to the blood center's laboratory, said Jeannine McCullough, chief quality officer at the blood center.

This can be a difficult task when an average of 187,000 donations from 5,000 mobile blood drives and 20 donation centers make their way across county and state lines each year.

The Davenport-based not-for-profit organization sells the more than 23,300 gallons of blood it collects a year from donations to 88 hospitals in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. That includes UnityPoint Health-St. Luke's Hospital and Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids.

Now instead of finding out a shipment is incomplete after it makes it through the manufacturing and testing processes, employees and volunteers have a real-time record, McCullough said.

The system also allows managers in the blood center's labs to plan their work more efficiently through its flight board - a central location that shows how many donations are in route as well as the oldest units.

So if a large mobile blood donation just finished at a high school, employees can see that 218 units are on the road, said Kirby Winn, the blood center's public relations director.

'From the point of donation forward, we've designed this for traceability and trackability,” Winn said.

Corresponding bar codes are placed on the donor cards, testing vials and donations, which periodically are scanned throughout the process - from the time they are packed into coolers at the point of donation until the time they are dropped off at the lab.

The technology was developed by a project team from the blood center that worked with programmers from BloodHub, a health care technology consultant based in Phoenix.

The team started developing the system in October 2012. That was followed by an 18-month long pilot program at several donation centers and finally was implemented across all centers this year.

Now the Mississippi Valley Regional Blood Center is testing the technology at mobile blood drives.

'This was developed by the people who do the work - they know the pain points,” McCullough said.

If at any point something is missing, the system notifies the employee or volunteer in possession of the items.

'There were increased incidents of items left at donation centers, left in a vehicle or lost,” McCullough said, noting before the Chain of Custody system was implemented there were two to five reported incident each month. Since going live in December, the center has only had two incidents and both were caught early.

When items are lost, employees must retrace steps to find missing product. And if the donation is a great deal of distance away - was forgotten in St. Louis, say - it can go bad. That equals time and money.

McCullough doesn't have any estimates yet on how much the new system has saved the organization because the program still is 'in its infancy.”

'By implementing this system, we don't have to wait to see what shows up in a delivery from our donor centers,” she said. 'We know exactly which coolers will be delivered and what's inside every cooler.”