American Red Cross Selects Motorola MC55 Mobile Computer for Blood Drives

Nationwide deployment includes mobile computing and wireless LAN solutions

The American Red Cross announced it will use a more than 6,000 Motorola MC55 mobile barcode scanners to improve tracking and documentation of blood donations for its blood drives.

The 36 Red Cross regions nationwide will have access to the new barcode scanning technology, which will enable them to keep an organized and accurate listing of donations when it conducts its more than 200,000 blood drives each year.

The organization collects 6.5 million blood donations annually from nearly four million volunteer donors. As much as 80 percent of these donations are collected during mobile blood drives held by various organizations, colleges or other community institutions.

Collecting blood donations requires a high-level of monitoring and safety protocols to ensure information is properly documented and marked. By using barcode technology, data for each blood donation can be quickly gathered and uploaded onto an electronic database.

Many health facilities have introduced barcode technology to improve the accuracy and management of blood packages. Recently, hospitals in the United Kingdom adopted a smartcard and barcode technology system to improve the safety and reliability of blood transfusions.