As the wars rage on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States Army is experiencing a huge demand for blood to treat soldiers injured on the battlefield. Due to the highly perishable nature of some blood products, with as little as a five-day shelf life, it is imperative that the Army's medical and supply soldiers collect, preserve, and distribute blood as quickly and accurately as possible in order to preserve the viability of every last drop. This urgency holds true throughout the blood supply chain, from donor centers in the United States to field blood bank units in the Middle East.
For years, Army blood teams nearest to the battlefront have been using a blood management system known as the Theater-Defense Blood Standard System (T-DBSS), which has gradually become inadequate in meeting the many needs related to field deployment. Using T-DBSS, blood units must be brought to a workstation tent for inventories. Here, technicians manually type blood inventory data into spreadsheets on a laptop computer that is connected to a server that hosts the blood database. The T-DBSS inventory system is slow, prone to error, and no longer supports all of the blood teams' essential functions in the field.
As a result of the inefficiencies in the system, precious blood was being wasted, and the Army was losing millions of dollars annually in misplaced and expired blood products.
The need for more efficient blood management has escalated due to the recent insurgent attacks in Iraq. While military hospitals normally transfuse approximately 79,000 blood products each year, the need for blood has increased by 400 percent compared to the levels required when the war began.
A moment of inspiration
Major Kevin Belanger, commander of the Army's 440th Blood Support Detachment, is in charge of a deployable blood bank unit that collects, manufactures, stores, and distributes blood products for military operations. With direct, hands-on experience, he is all too familiar with the shortcomings of T-DBSS for blood teams deployed on the battlefield.
"It isn't practical in the field because it is complicated and you are restricted to a workstation," he said. "The soldiers needed a reliable, portable device to make their jobs easier."
After viewing a presentation on Battlefield Medical Information System-Telemedicine (BMIST), a Pocket PC-based diagnostic tool for the Army's first responders, Belanger recognized that a handheld application would be great for mobile blood teams as well.
The Battlefield Medical Information System (BMIST) served as the inspiration for the development of a new way for the Army to track blood supplies.
Major Belanger shared his ideas with the mobile computing division of the Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, which developed BMIST. Belanger became a consultant for the project, which eventually led to the creation of the Blood Inventory Program (BIP), a cutting-edge mobile blood management system that combines the latest in handheld computing, bar code scanning, and wireless technologies.
The mobile blood management system consists of a Bluetooth-enabled HP iPAQ hx4700 series Pocket PC, the Army's BIP application, and the Socket Cordless Hand Scanner with Bluetooth Wireless Technology. Medical and supply soldiers use the scanner to scan bar codes on blood bags to quickly retrieve information including the unit number, blood type, expiration date, and product code. Scanned data is sent wirelessly via Bluetooth directly into the Pocket PC, where it is automatically entered into a database chip. A waterproof, crush-proof, and ruggedized case from OtterBox protects the Pocket PC from damage, essential for military deployment.
The Blood Inventory Program's main screen. Blood is tracked throughout its journey from donor to storage area to recipient.
The Blood Inventory Program (BIP)
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