Abstract
The growing amount of tissues transplanted every year challenges the bookkeeping of tissue banks to guarantee prompt and reliable traceability. The task is even harder when the tissues are procured, stored and transplanted in diffenrent hospitals. The problems faced us during the years led us to seek a solution from the new electronic possibilities.
The Tampere University Tissue Bank is collecting tissues and data from 9 different units. The tissues have been transplanted mostly in Tampere University Hospital but delivered also to 10 other hospitals for transplantation. A Microsoft Access based program was used for bookkeeping. We had to do double work when bringing the data from papers to tha Access database. To ease the work we started to develop a Web-based program, which could discuss between the different units.
An up-to date Web-based program has been created and it has been testdriven from the beginning of September 2002. The tissue-harvesting and tissue-transplanting units can fill the electronic forms ready in Web. The central bank sees the up-to-date information in the central registry in the Web. For the sake of patient security the forms are planned so that every box in the form has to be filled or otherwise the program does not progress and you are not able to continue. We have managed to minimize the mistakes of tissue bookkeeping caused by human errors. We have also managed to speed-up and standardize the whole bookkeeping process of tissue-harvesting and tissue-transplanting dramatically. It is also very easy to generate different kind of research reports by thisWeb-based system. The security of the data is guaranteed by encrypted connections and fault-tolerant server clusters situated in high-security hosting centres.
We have been able to remove the overlapping paper work. There are no more missing or wrongly filled data. The several paper-vision files of tissue on different stages during the laboratory checking is now replaced only with one final file, which is printed for archive when the tissue has been used and also the data or recipient has been filled. The forms and the whole program are easy to modify and all users can utilize the new up-to-dated versions immediately. It makes the database very flexible and every user has the possibility to improve the program. Because of these improvements the safety and the possibility for quick traceability have been increased.
Theses abstracts were prepared by Professor Dr. Frantz Langlais. Correspondence should be addressed to him at EFORT Central Office, Freihofstrasse 22, CH-8700 Küsnacht, Switzerland.
