S3Edge Spotlight Software to Power National Healthcare Initiative to Track Blood Products From Donor Sites to Blood Centers, All the Way to Hospital Bed-Side Point of Care

PORTLAND, Ore., Oct. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- S3Edge Inc., a leading provider of packaged enterprise software on the Microsoft platform for the Auto-ID industry, today announced that the Transfusion Medicine RFID Consortium (www.transfusionmedicinerfid.org) has selected S3Edge's Spotlight software to deliver a suite of packaged applications for tracking and monitoring blood products across the transfusion medicine supply chain.

The Institute of Medicine and other leading organizations have called out the high incidence of medical errors that result in between 44,000 to 98,000 American deaths each year wherein subsets of these incidents are due to mis-transfusion: the wrong blood being given to the wrong patient. Reducing medical errors and enhancing the safety and quality of healthcare delivery has widely been recognized as a national priority, and enabling error-free delivery of blood products is a key component of enhancing overall healthcare safety.  The members of Transfusion Medicine RFID Consortium have been actively engaged in the first-ever comprehensive investigation to research and develop a solution to enhance patient safety, reduce operating costs and strengthen quality in the blood supply chain. The Consortium has been working with S3Edge to design a suite of web-based and mobile applications for blood centers and hospitals that:

• Automates check-in of collections at donor sites
• Eliminates errors during receipt / release of blood products at blood centers
• Provide granular visibility of all products as they flow from the donor site to the blood center, all the way to bedside point of care at hospitals, and
• Ensures patient safety by verifying that the right product is being administered to the right patient at transfusion time

The solution, which utilizes High Frequency (HF) RFID technology in concert with barcodes, is expected to address one of the industry's priorities in minimizing transfusion medical errors. The first set of applications for blood centers and hospitals will be demonstrated at the upcoming AABB Annual Meeting & CTTXPO 2010 to be held in Baltimore from October 9-12, 2010.

"We are extremely pleased to team up with S3Edge to design, and develop this innovative application for the transfusion medicine industry.  Our collaborative, best-of-breed approach, which brings together the domain expertise in Transfusion Medicine practices and S3Edge's software strength, will deliver unparalleled levels of efficiencies for blood centers and hospitals across their supply chain operations," said Rodeina Davis, Vice President and Chief Information Officer for BloodCenter of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, and Principal Investigator & Program Director of the NIH-funded study to introduce the use of RFID technology in transfusion medicine.

"S3Edge's packaged asset tracking software has enabled us to go from assessing technical feasibility to building out a set of applications that address the operational needs of blood centers and hospitals in a relatively short period of time," said Tina Chang, executive sponsor of the project and CEO of SysLogic Inc., a Brookfield, Wisconsin-based information systems consulting and services firm.  "Their technical abilities and experience in deploying enterprise-ready applications has helped the consortium deliver on the promise of a packaged mission critical solution to improve the safety and efficiency of our nation's blood supply," she added.

"As Auto-ID technologies become a mission critical component of healthcare systems, having a scalable software solution that keeps pace with the latest technology developments is going to be crucial in order to reap the benefits of barcode, RFID, and sensor technologies in day-to-day operations. S3Edge looks forward to continuing to work in tandem with this team of distinguished researchers, and health care stakeholders to develop and deploy mission critical real time visibility and control solutions for end users," said Mark Anastas, President of S3Edge Inc.

For more information, please visit the Transfusion Medicine RFID Consortium website at www.transfusionmedicinerfid.org, the S3Edge website at www.s3edge.com/healthcare, or visit us at booth #102 at the AABB Annual Meeting & CTTXPO 2010 to be held in Baltimore from October 9-12, 2010

SOURCE S3Edge Inc.