The same technology used by EZ-Pass to tally miles traveled on toll roads, monitor goods at Wal-Mart and track animal movement through ear tags may lead scientists to improve the quality and safety of the nation's blood supply, according to researchers at UW-Madison.
Radio frequency identification, or RFID, determines an object's identity and location by communicating through radio waves between the information stored on a microchip tag and a centralized computer reader.
Although RFID first became popular for its ability to distinguish friendly planes from enemies during World War II, technological advancements have allowed scientists to continue to work on decreasing the cost of RFID while increasing the accuracy of the reading.
At UW-Madison's RFID Lab in the College of Engineering, director Alfonso Gutierrez said researchers are taking the available technology one step further and looking for ways to use RFID to improve current business systems.
UW teams up with blood centers
As part of an ongoing project with the BloodCenter of Wisconsin, Carter Blood Care in Dallas and Mississippi Blood Services in Jackson, Miss., Gutierrez's lab is looking to RFID to help identify ways to improve the safety, quality and movement of blood from blood donor to patient.
According to Sarah Stevermer, communications and public relations specialist at the Badger Chapter of the American Red Cross, more than 5 million patients in the United States are in need of blood transfusions, and approximately 8 million people donate blood each year. Stevermer said there are more than 90,000 volunteer blood donors in the Badger-Hawkeye region, which covers the state of Wisconsin and Iowa.
We try to keep blood here to meet the [local] needs for blood first, but [once these needs are met] blood can be transferred all over the U.S.,"" Stevermer said. ""We ship blood to California, the east coast ... the national system allows blood to be transferred anywhere.""
As blood travels from the veins of donors to patients both locally and nationally, it passes through the hands of multiple professionals who check the accuracy of the blood information and sort it accordingly.
Gutierrez said the current system of tracking the nation's blood supply uses barcodes on each bag of blood to store information about the blood's identity. To retrieve this information, nurses must individually scan each bag of blood like a supply of grocery items at the check-out. According to Gutierrez, the large volume of blood requiring individual scanning by nurses each day can slow efficiency and increase the likelihood for human error.
If mistakes are made and detected during the process of identifying and transporting blood, professionals may be forced to destroy the blood supplies. If mistakes make it into the blood bag of a transfusion recipient, the transfusion will likely be ineffective, causing a delay in the patient's recovery, or, in the most severe cases, result in death. In 2005 alone, the U.S. Department of Health found reports of more than 32,000 adverse reactions related to transfusions in national medical centers.
Tagging blood
""The problem with the current system [of transporting blood] is you are limited in the amount of data you can get from one bag of blood and it is cumbersome to individually scan and re-scan each bag of blood,"" Gutierrez said.
RFID, Gutierrez said, may offer a solution to the current blood-tracking system.
By replacing bar codes with RFID tags, Gutierrez said health care providers can track the contents of multiple bags of blood simultaneously.
Unlike a bar-code system, where a laser beam must pass directly over the code in order to retrieve stored information, RFID tags take advantage of a microchip for storing information and an antenna to transmit and receive information from a computerized reader.
Gutierrez said implementing RFID tags on blood bags would allow health care providers to read stored information about blood type, expiration and information about where the donated blood was acquired, from a computer without the blood bag directly in front of them.
""If you take the routine work away from humans, you diminish the potential for errors,"" Gutierrez said. ""When you relieve humans [of routine work] they have more time to devote to real care.""
As the RFID blood project continues, researchers are beginning to use RFID to explore the points of human error in the hospital setting and determine ways they can be improved. Ultimately, Gutierrez hopes to help standardize blood treatment by using RFID at blood banks across the country.
New solutions to old problems
Using RFID to track blood is only one of many ways researchers believe RFID can be used to improve the quality of other areas in the health care system.
Jack Shen, a graduate student in Industrial and Systems Engineering and project assistant at the RFID Lab, is using the technology to help local hospitals such as UW Hospital and Meriter keep track of expensive hospital equipment.
According to Shen, health care workers are constantly confounded by the disappearance of expensive equipment such as mobile laptops, IV pumps and wheelchairs, resulting in the loss of millions of dollars annually.
By placing RFID tags on hospital equipment and computer reader stations throughout the hospital, doctors and nurses can search for equipment through RFID signals sent to main computers.
""RFID will not only allow nurses to find the location of equipment in real-time but can also help them to know the status of the equipment,"" Shen said.
With RFID, Shen explained nurses could scan a wheelchair, ""flipping the on/off switch on the tag."" In turn, the tag would send a message to the computer, saying its in use.
In the future, Shen said he will continue to work with the hospitals to assess the areas where RFID can be of most use to the health care providers.
""There are a lot of companies where there are inefficiencies and problems, and vendors offer some solution that doesn't completely solve the problem,"" Shen said. ""[At UW] we are taking the solutions out there and tailoring [them] to the needs of the company.""
With health care, correcting some of the inefficiencies in business systems can mean saved lives.
""Health care is an area that has always been personal to me,"" Gutierrez said. ""We are looking at how to apply technology to enhance the lives of people.
