An Automated Military Blood Typing System

The objective of this study was to implement an automated military blood typing system designed to reduce the extent of the manual tasks and at the same time enhance the accuracy and reliability of the blood typing process. The major features of the automated military blood typing system are: (1) Test Result Readers which will automatically read up to 15 channels of AutoAnalyzer output directly from the filter paper record currently in use; (2) Sample Identification units which will automatically encode Vacutainers with machine and human readable numbers and which will read these numbers automatically during AutoAnalyzer testing; (3) A means of automatically supplying blood type tags for labeling whole blood bags; (4) Automatic generation of roster sheets for use in the preparation of recruit dog tags; (5) Complete status and daily summary reporting of all blood typing operations; (6) Donor/recruit information file providing rapid access to blood analysis histories. In general, the automated system eliminates errors resulting from tedious manual transcription. (Modified author abstract)