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 Blood Centers of America, Inc., (BCA) is a cooperative venture whose members are community blood centers across the United States. The BCA cooperative supports thirty-five member blood centers that provide thirty percent of the nation's transfusion requirements. BCA's focus is on improving the operations and business activities of the member blood centers.
Among the cooperative’s key functions are group purchases of goods and services to keep costs under control for members. Another key function is data collection and information sharing. BCA has developed a valuable information sharing reporting application that is shared among its members using LogiXML’s Logi Info product. The key Logi application is an information sharing Dashboard that allows member organization to view blood product inventory by blood type and other subcategories over a secure connection.
Members can easily see where shortages and excess inventories of particular blood products are located and the consortium can then handle the appropriate transfer transactions between centers to satisfy the need. The reports are generated from data managed in a SQL Server database located at the group’s Rhode Island headquarters and shared via the Web. The role based security capabilities are a key feature in the success of this system.
Also, in response to post Hurricane Katrina planning, BCA can now extend access to the dashboard system to non-member blood centers to support information sharing during national and regional emergencies.
“We are not a huge organization, but we have a very big job to do,” notes Director of Information Services, Greg Bishop. “We have now been using Logi Info for nearly two years and one of the most impressive parts of my interaction with the company was the original sales experience. LogiXML was responsive to our needs as a small organization in terms of demos of the product, in terms of pricing and in responsiveness to our questions.”
“The key feature of our application is the Dashboarding interface that allows our members to see the status of our blood product inventory. The availability of particular blood types or blood components products can vary greatly throughout the country. The users can easily exit to our transactional system to initiate a transfer order on the spot. The ability to provide a very quickly-understood visual presentation of our data is what really makes the application work for our members.”
“Of course when dealing with a critical product like human blood, security is a major concern. The capacity of Logi Info to offer role-based security level is an outstanding feature of the Logi system. We can centrally assign access levels so the right person can see exactly the reports that relate to their functions at the center. Also, the elemental design approach to develop a single report can be customized for several people. In that situation a single report can serve as the basis of five custom reports. That is true productivity.”
“The security function also comes into play in our interactions with non-BCA centers. We have demonstrated our Dashboard interface to our colleagues and they are very impressed with the application.—so much so that we have developed an agreement that the entire national network of centers can be granted access to the interface in the event of a catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina or a terrorist incident. This effort was a result of post Katrina planning in the medical services field.”
“We have been very pleased with the support we get from LogiXML. If I have any complaint, it is that the company keeps pushing out new functionality faster than I can utilize it. Exciting features like the Google Maps interface will have to wait until I can get through my non-Logi priorities. But please do not stop innovating,” concludes Bishop.
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