Abstract
The increase of productivity and safety of diagnostic testing as well as the reduction of costs and fulfilling the strict legal recommendations and guidelines are major tasks in blood bank services. To achieve all these aims without allocating enormous capacities of personnel, the introduction of automated technologies and data processing systems may be the only alternative. In the present assessment, we describe the most widely distributed automatic systems for blood bank services. This review describes the currently available automated immunohaematological systems and illustrates the evaluation of the fully automated system - Ortho AutoVue (R) Innova - as compared to standard manual methods. Work processes of our blood bank were reviewed to establish where improvements could be achieved before installing the automated testing instrument. The suitability of automation and data processing in order to support the bulk of routine and emergency work was explored. The improvement of the arrangement of the workspace led to a reduction of the specimen receipt operator working process time by 6%, whereas the review of the activity of the operator's time led to a reduction of 53%. Consistent results were achieved for blood group (100%), rhesus typing (100%), antibody screening (100%) and for auto control (87%) using the manual Diamed system and the automatic AutoVue (R) system. A consistent result of 8206 was achieved for antibody screening with frozen samples with known antibodies. The turnaround time, as calculated from the receipt at the blood bank to the completion of standard cross-match, blood typing and antibody screening, was decreased up to 17% using the automatic system due to the standardisation and automation of testing. The Ortho AutoVue (R) Innova system automates routine blood bank testing encompassing blood typing, cross-matching and antibody screening with high reliability, sensitivity and specificity compared to standard manual methods.