Tell me again why we need to implement ISBT 128?

Daily in transfusion medicine, projects can seem to be insurmountable. ISBT 128 is a major project for most organizations. It is easy to lose sight of the reason why the implementation of ISBT is so critical. ISBT project activities compete for time and energy reserved for every day problems and priorities. Why is ISBT the right thing to do for blood centers and transfusion services?

The health care environment is faced with increasing demands to improve patient care and one of the hottest topics is patient identification. Positive identification has also been on the plate for blood centers for some time now in regards to maintaining trackability from start to finish of the donor, the collected products and any record associated with manufacturing. The ISBT 128 symbology and associated benefits help address these critical issues: • ISBT allows blood to be shipped all over the world and be accepted by any blood bank or transfusion center without modifying the unique donation number or component code. This became important in Desert Storm when the military was receiving blood from all over the world in Iraq. • The ISBT format for the donation number allows for complete traceability because it identifies the country, collection site, etc. • ISBT is a more secure symbology than ABC codabar; it improves scanning accuracy by preventing miss-scans. • ISBT allows for future expansion of product codes and barcode information. Codabar is almost at its limit. • The label contains more information that can be inputs into an information system. • ISBT allows us to concatenate (read concurrently) several fields when scanning, thereby reducing the number of scans needed for several purposes. This also reduces the potential for data entry errors. • Eliminates duplicate donation numbers; which is becoming more problematic everyday.

Visit the Blood Systems at www.bloosystems.org or United Blood Services (www.unitedbloodservices.org) for useful tools for ISBT implementation. Visit the “official” website www.iccbba.org and learn about ISBT as well as review the most up to date information on the product codes.

Regulatory and accreditation agencies such as the Joint Commission, CAP, AABB and FDA, are currently focusing on patient identification and ISBT is one solution.

A quote from the Joint Commission website reads: “No adverse event should ever occur anywhere in the world if the knowledge exists to prevent it from happening. However, such knowledge is of little use if it is not put into practice.” This applies to ISBT.

Contact Quality Source at www.qualitysource.org for assistance with ISBT.