Blood Banking on RFID

Here's an interview with Dr. Clive Hohberger who has more than 24 years of experience as an executive in the automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) industry. In it, he discusses the progress being made using RFID technology on global blood bank inventory. Interesting stuff. Among other things, he simply explains:

Now the clear advantage of RFID over barcodes is the fact that you can read an entire blood container without opening it and that you don’t have to reposition every bag in a tray in order to read the contents as described on the RFID label. So that’s why we’re using an RFID device rather than a two dimensional barcode; it’s simply to avoid having to handle all these individual blood bags. With an RFID reader we can read an entire tray or an entire cooler of blood bags all at once... But there are also other advantages of RFID, in particular the fact that you can write information to a tag as well as read information, unlike a barcode. And so when you get into the actual area of dispensing these bags, and process control during the processing of a blood bag, you can incrementally store the results of each processing step on the RFID tag.