Brainswave Technologies, Pune, has developed a system for blood bank management called Blood Link for small hospitals and blood banks. The system aims to speed up every task and minimise the scope of human error.

Dwelling on the proposed solution for blood banks, Hemant Patnaik, business process consultant, Brainswave, said, "Blood Link functions as a complete blood bank manager, right from validating the donors to cross matching and issuing blood bags for recipients."

Commenting on the existing system, Patnaik said, at present, most of the blood banks use a manual system for recording data related to the blood donors, cross matching, issuing of blood bags, etc. On an average, each blood bank handles about 2500 to 3000 blood bags per month and the manual process for maintaining records for these blood bags is quite tedious and time consuming.

Patnaik assured that the Blood Link system could speed up and improve the working of the blood banks so as to provide immediate results in the least possible time. "The system is very cost effective for small hospitals as they do not need to invest in the whole hospital management package."

Elucidating the exclusive feature of the system Patnaik said the system is parameter driven and is very flexible. This flexibility gives it the ability to respond immediately to changes in the user requirements. This reduces the requirement for additional code to take care of new requirements and thus reduces cost to the user.

Amongst the indirect benefits of the system, the system controls the stocking and issue of contaminated blood to the patients, preventing spread of fatal diseases like AIDS, hepatitis, diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases amongst others. It also helps prevent the issuing of expired blood bags and prevents from taking blood from donors whose blood had been rejected during the previous blood donation.

Elaborating on the future scope, Patnaik said in the future, all the blood banks could be linked with each other. In case all the blood banks are using the same software, information sharing would become much easier. Once all the Blood Banks are linked with each other, the State Ministry of Health can easily monitor the blood banks. Also, the existing software could be modified to send auto email messages to the donors during emergency. To achieve this, all the blood banks would need to have an Internet access. This feature will help the blood bank / patients relatives to easily get in touch with the donors of the same blood group.