SummithHealth Hospital Show Low, Arizona, United States
Background/Case Studies: Staffing constraints continue to impact transfusion services, making it essential to manage the increase assay demands, with fewer skilled personnel. Many hospitals address this by implementing blood bank automation. These instruments incorporate various methodologies that effect their overall specificity which can affect workflow efficiency. Ensuring acceptable sensitivity while minimizing unnecessary workups of clinically insignificant antibodies is critical. This study compares the specificity of three blood bank analyzers.
Study
Design/Methods: An antibody detection comparison was performed during a week-long study using three analyzers. Instruments included the current instrumentation: Erytra (Grifols, Sant Cugat del Vallès, Spain), a validated & ready to implement instrument, Vision Swift (QuidelOrtho, San Diego, CA) and a demo unit, Echo Lumena (Werfen, Norcross, GA). Negative samples were used from the facility and randomly selected based on adequate volume for testing. All samples were tested randomly with no specific instrument or order.
Results/Findings: The data was collected and reviewed for each instrument. Of 93 available samples, six were excluded due to clot or insufficient volume, leaving 87 samples tested across all three analyzers. Among these, 21 samples were antibody-positive, and 66 were negative. The Vision detected 11 equivocal ("?") results (16.7%), Erytra detected one (1.5%), and Echo Lumena detected zero samples as equivocal. (0.0%). (See Table 1).
Conclusions: With ongoing staffing challenges, optimizing blood bank automation is key to maintaining efficiency without compromising patient care. Reducing the number of samples flagged as equivocal ("?") results minimizes wasted technologist time, reagents, and potential delays. In this study of 87 samples tested concurrently, QuildelOrtho Vision Swift resulted in significantly more equivocal results (16.7%) than the other two blood bank analyzers: Grifols Erytra (1.5%) and Werfen Echo Lumena (0.0%).
