NIH awards $1.4 million grant to continue developing an RFID-enabled supply chain for blood products.
UW RFID Lab is a project partner.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), through their Small Business Technology Transfer Program, has awarded a two-year, $1.4 million grant for an STTR Phase 2 project on “RFID Application in the Blood Products Supply Chain.” The UW RFID Lab is a project partner and will receive $420,000.
Rodeina Davis, CIO of BloodCenter of Wisconsin, is the PI, representing the award recipient SysLogic Inc., a Brookfield-based custom software development and consulting firm. Key UW-Madison personnel on this project are Professor Raj Veeramani (serving as the PI at UW-Madison) and Alfonso Gutierrez, Director of the UW RFID Lab.
“This project addresses one of the national priorities of the US Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health,” Dr. Veeramani said. “Through innovative application of RFID, it will help reduce mortalities stemming from transfusion medical errors.”
The STTR Phase 2 grant will enable the project team to build upon a three-year collaborative-research effort involving multiple blood centers and hospitals across the nation.
“It partners academia with leaders in the blood-transfusion and technology-supply industries to transform blood-products supply chain management,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “UW RFID Lab’s research team looks forward to contributing to this challenging and high-impact project.”
The project is the first-ever comprehensive investigation to research, develop and introduce innovative application of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology for automatic identification, tracking and status-monitoring of blood and blood products across the entire transfusion medicine supply chain, from the point of collection to the delivery of a product by a healthcare provider to a patient. The goal of the project is to create a failsafe system for automatic identification and data capture that will reduce medical errors and enhance the safety, quality, responsiveness and cost-effectiveness of patient-centered transfusion medicine care.
To find out more about the UW RFID Lab and its work, contact Alfonso Gutierrez, UW RFID Lab Director, at agutierr@wisc.edu or 608-262-5690.