Enhancing blood ordering management of Malaysian national blood centre

Abstract

As the responsible blood centre of central Malaysia, Pusat Darah Negara (PDN) manages over a thousand requests from both private and government hospitals daily. Every blood request is regarded as urgent and thus, processed immediately. However due to the irregular and unpredictable status of blood stock, combined with limited shelf life of the blood products, some requests were unfulfilled. Currently, all blood requesting operations in Malaysia are managed using manual physical form and unfulfilled requests are informed by telephone and email. But, because of the high load of requests, PDN response might be delayed, therefore risking the life of patients on the receiving end. In this project, an online web-based blood requesting system in an open sourced client-server Drupal 7 Content Management System environment with features such as requesting, replying and monitoring functions is proposed for development. Studies have shown that E-health systems can be benefiting to the healthcare sector. Therefore, an electronic requesting system is hypothesized able to efficiently mediate the communication between blood centre and hospital, provide automated data reporting capability to its users, and ultimately provide a competent blood inventory management system. At the end of the System Development Life Cycle, PDN unanimously agree that the system met their requirements and completion of the project is finalized by the signing of the User Acceptance Test document. Accordingly, on the 23rd November 2016, the online web-based Malaysia’s Blood Ordering System (MyBOS) officially replaced the paper-based blood ordering form to mediate blood requesting operations for central Malaysia. In a survey distributed to 27 participating hospitals, all 38 respondents agreed that the system is a definite improvement over the paper-based system and over 76.31% of the users agrees that the system’s added functionality improves the overall blood management operation.