Patients with red cell antibodies: registries improve patient care by increasing patient safety, reducing costs, and enabling health information exchange

Abstract

Preview

Some countries or regions have registries for sharing data of patients with a history of red cell antibodies, usually on a voluntary basis. Most countries, however, lack a comprehensive national database. The need used to be pressing for patients with antibodies to rare antigens, when only one individual or less among 1,000 donors has compatible blood, and the patients themselves were in the past the main pool for potential donors¹. This donor pool became restricted by more stringent donor criteria and has mostly been replaced by efficient red cell genotyping among healthy donors without antibodies^2,3,4. [ ... ]