A Standard Compliant Blood Bank Management System with Enforcing Mechanism

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Abstract—Blood is a non-replenishable entity, the only source of which are humans. Timely availability of quality blood is a crucial requirement for sustaining the healthcare services.
Therefore, maintaining quality of blood and identification of Professional Donors is a major responsibility of blood banks.
NACO (National AIDS Control Organization) and NABH (National Accreditation Board for hospitals and Healthcare Providers) have provided guidelines for ensuring the quality of blood and identifying Professional Donors. Moreover, manually monitoring standards and identifying professional donors is a challenging job. In this work, we develop a standard compliant Blood Bank Management System with a novel rule based enforcing mechanism. The developed system is an end-to-end solution for not only managing but implementing enforcing strategies and providing decision support to the users. The proposed Blood Bank Management System has been implemented across 28 blood banks and a major hospital. It has been found extremely effective in streamlining the workflow of blood banks.
Keywords—Blood Bank Management System; Blood Stock; NACO; NABH; Professional Donor; Donor Repository

The major concern of blood banks is to ensure efficient and effective collection and maintenance of quality blood stock as well as identification of Professional Donors (Section II-E).
This becomes crucial since the span of time, especially in emergency situations, between requirement, arrangement and delivery of blood is very narrow. Moreover, blood banks across the state, districts are not able to utilize the available blood stock appropriately due to lack of connectivity and time taken to propagate information via conventional channels.
National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) and National Accreditation Board for hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH) have provided guidelines to ensure the quality of blood. But there is absence of effective enforcement strategy to ensure the adherence to these guidelines. In view of this, we propose a comprehensive IT solution i.e. a Blood Bank Management System (BBMS) attempting to address this problem by providing means to connect, digitize and streamline the workflow of blood banks.
The need for automating blood banks have been there for a long time. In early days of digitization, the primary purpose of an IT solution for blood banks was inventory management [6][13]. With time, the processes involved in management of services of blood bank as well as Blood Transfusion System [5][4] have become more complex. The main issue, which plagues BBMS in the country is enforcing the standards and identification of the Professional Donors. Therefore, in the modern world the purpose of BBMS is not only to passively act as inventory management system but to actively enforce standard operating procedures along with providing decision support. Recent Blood Bank Management Systems tend to focus on adapting the system to local practices instead of enforcing standard practices. The developed solution augments the functionality of the contemporary systems.
Authors in [15] developed a blood bank management system which adhered to the requirements of a single hospital. The system developed in [3] caters to a National level transfusion service, but limits the scope to providing citizen centric services and inventory management. Authors in [8], attempt to address the issue of safe transfusion by developing an end to end solution. A real time system for blood bank has been proposed in [1].
A recent study [12] has observed that the existing workflow of blood banks needs to be strengthened, both in terms of planning and monitoring. Also, there are many gaps in the management of blood supply [16] [9]. Our work
addresses the following gaps as compared to similar systems.
Firstly, the existing systems have been designed to take care of routine functioning of blood bank and care not able to enforce the guidelines and standards based on rules. Secondly, identification of professional donors, if available, is usually based on bio-metric devices only. Such identification mechanisms mostly require an additional level of integration effort and scrutiny by the blood bank staff. Thirdly, quality checks are based on manual entry processes. In addition to these fundamental issues, there are many challenges that are encountered when such a system is implemented across a large number of locations. These challenges are discussed in Section II-A. In view of the above, the contributions of this paper are:
• Development of a standard compliant Blood Bank Management System including a stringent rule based enforcing mechanism.
• Architecture for a fault-tolerant deployment especially for rural and areas with sparse connectivity.
• Identifying key requirements and learnings from implementation of a Blood Bank Management System for large scale deployments

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section describes the proposed system. Section III presents the details of implementation. The impact of the system as compared to pre-deployment scenario is discussed in Section IV. Finally, Section V concludes this paper.