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How to Keep Your Blood Products at A+ Conditions

Each year, approx. 6.8 million people donate blood in the US. Still, supply doesn’t always meet demand, making how blood is processed, stored and monitored crucial to safeguard the supply.

By Thomas W. Flanagan

16 May 2022

A breach in temperature outside the predetermined range of 2-6 °C is all it takes. Once breached, some products will have to be disposed of immediately. This in turn has critical costs for replacing the products and the impact on patients awaiting transfusion.

The Best Way to Reduce Risks and Costs

Avoiding such disasters and complying with regulatory requirements can be addressed through similar means: continuous monitoring. With a proper monitoring system in place for daily and weekly temperature checks, manual inspections become a thing of the past – drastically minimizing potential risks.

Additionally, by digitizing the process, you also get to learn why and how the temperature of your storage is breaching the predefined boundaries. And you get to see the length of time the temperature was outside the boundaries, potentially allowing you to save some products from disposal.

Easily Stay Compliant and In Control

With a continuous monitoring system, it doesn’t matter whether your clinics are closed or open, or staff are unavailable or present – everything gets recorded. Maintaining regulatory compliance becomes a breeze when the temperature of your units is recorded consistently. For instance, through configurable intervals (e.g., 30 or 60 minutes).

While a manually checked thermometer can display if a unit was out of range according to the parameters set, it cannot specify the length of time the unit was out of range for or how many times the door was opened or left ajar. Through recordings, you can go back and verify these events, and determine the fate of your samples based on that.