This continues a new category of posts: Guest columns where friends and
readers share how technology is reshaping their hobby – fishing, basket weaving,
rugby – whatever.
This time it is Tom Foydel who runs SightLines, a NetSuite reseller. He writes about donating blood...wait a minute... that's not a hobby!
As he puts it "there have been many years where I gave blood more times than I golfed." Fair enough, read on...
"Yesterday my church held its annual blood drive. As I was moving through the various stages of the process I was impressed about the state of technology in use by the American Red Cross at a mobile blood drive clinic.
It started with the sign-up and administration stage. They keyed my name into a laptop fitted with wireless internet access and a very simple telnet interface to their central donor database application. It was like she was running a dumb terminal, and the lack of graphics made the application move right along. She corrected my phone number in the system, and went through some other base information.
Then she switched over to another application and I sat at the laptop and answered maybe 40 questions about primarily social activity and personal travel. In our interconnected, and let us say it, less modest, world there are real issues with blood quality.
Then a new nurse came over and used a clever little device to prick my finger, drawing a small amount into a cartridge that was then run through a desktop hemoglobin analysis unit. The results were included in my permanent record. When this was finished I had a completed profile that was printed on the wireless network and included a bar code.
The bar code, now part of my record at the American Red Cross, followed me everywhere through the process. They first used the bar code to create a little plastic id tag that they attached to my form. Later when I was done they said that should I become ill in the next few days, I could call in with my id and they would be able to find my bar-coded blood and remove it from the supply chain.
Then I went to the area where they actually draw the blood. They took my printout and again lasered the bar code at least four times as they marked everything that they used to take my blood and the blood itself.
Taking blood has not changed over the last 30 years however. There is still the pressure on the arm, the hand squeezing and a ‘slight’ prick. But you are done in under 7 minutes, so no harm, no foul. As you can see from my picture, I can even use the finger for some chinposin
Of course, there is plenty more technology downstream which breaks the blood down into groups, components and who knows what else. But you need to go to medical school for many years to even pronounce some of that stuff!
A couple of Lorna Doone cookies and an apple juice and I was on my way chuckling about the sign I had seen at another blood bank "
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