Audit Ready and In Control: 3 Ways to Simplify Your Blood Bank Operations

For blood banks and pathology labs, the mission is clear: to protect the lifesaving supplies that patients depend on. Your team is dedicated to this goal, but the operational demands of ensuring constant audit readiness and preventing alarm fatigue can feel overwhelming, especially when a single unit of blood in a country such as Australia can cost up to AU $1,000.  

Whether you manage transfusion supplies, source plasma, biotherapy components or inventory for other blood bank applications, an environmental monitoring system built for your specific operational needs gives your team the clarity to investigate excursions and ensure all storage policies are followed.  

Let’s break down how a system engineered for these settings addresses each core operational demand, from the physical probe in your freezer to the final report in an auditor’s hand. 

1. Streamline the Audit Process With Robust Data Collection 

To simplify the audit process, the goal is to establish a state of continuous readiness, shifting from reactive preparation to proactive, always-on compliance. How accurately and efficiently your data is collected, secured, and reported can make the difference between passing with confidence and having to address deficiencies.  

By switching to a more efficient platform, teams can reduce audit prep time from 2-3 days to less than an hour, leading to reported savings of up to AU $10,000 annually. This is part of a larger efficiency gain, with some blood banks saving up to AU $30,000 per year in total labor costs. 

Here’s how a real-time environmental monitoring platform streamlines the process: 

Meet Standards and Best Practices:  

• Platforms with continuous, real-time monitoring make it easy to generate reports to demonstrate compliance with the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies (AABB) 4-hour temperature logging requirement. 

• Records can be stored securely in the cloud or on-site to comply with the AABB’s 10-year retention rules. Secure cloud storage also ensures data redundancy, protecting you from data loss due to hardware or server failure. 

Produce Secure and Validated Records: 

• Monitoring systems that are validated for FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliance provide tamper-proof records and a secure, computer-generated audit trail. 

2. End Alarm Fatigue with Smarter Alarm Management 

In a blood bank or storage facility, staff attentiveness to critical alerts is essential. Smarter alarm management supports this focus by meeting multiple national standards for quality assurance of blood components while ensuring your team only responds to genuine excursions. Here’s how intelligent alerting improves focus and empowers your team: 

Filter Out Noise with Custom Alarms: Smart alerts differentiate between a brief door opening and a true excursion, drastically reducing nuisance notifications. 

Meet National Standards for Quality: This technology makes it easy to comply with requirements for 24/7 audible alarms that are regularly tested and set to trigger before temperatures go out of range. 

Enable Mobile Access for Immediate Response: Monitoring systems with mobile access via an app reduce the need for constant in-person oversight and increase team flexibility. 

3. Manage All Blood Product Temperatures from a Single Dashboard 

A centralized platform gives you total control over the complex matrix of temperatures required for different blood products. From refrigerated red cells and room-temperature platelets to deep-frozen plasma, each product has its own non-negotiable storage requirements. 

Managing these varied environments simultaneously across dozens of units is a significant operational challenge. A modern monitoring platform should be fully compatible with your existing equipment, such as Follett, Helmer Scientific, and ThermoFisher Scientific refrigerators, and help your blood bank: 

Gain Total Visibility: A unified dashboard allows managers to oversee every piece of equipment—from refrigerators, freezers, and platelet incubators  — and all critical parameters in one place. 

Simplify Profile Management: Easily manage multiple alarm profiles for different products (e.g., red cells, plasma, and reagents) from a single location. 

Ensure Data Integrity: This centralized view simplifies the supervisor review of logs and documentation of corrective actions, as emphasized by national standards. 

The End Result? Enhanced Patient Safety and Peace of Mind 

By integrating these functions, a modern environmental monitoring system transforms a blood bank’s operations from a reactive model to a proactive one. Dickson’s OCEAView™ Cloud and OCEAView™ On-Premise platforms provide total visibility into your critical assets through an easy-to-use application and mobile app 

Top features include 24/7 remote monitoring from any device, customizable alerts delivered via phone, text, and email that can be acknowledged directly from your phone. 

This intelligent alerting makes a tangible difference. One QA Manager at a U.S. hospital noted, “Since implementing Dickson’s system, we’ve reduced nuisance alarms by over 50%.”  

The platform also allows you to generate and share automated reports, ensures compliance with secure, time-stamped data logging, and is highly scalable to manage thousands of devices at once. 

Learn more about OCEAView, request a free no-risk demo, or contact us with any questions.