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 The Theater Blood Application, introduced in 2011, is now in use at
more than 249 sites, Defense Health Agency spokesman Kevin Dwyer
said.
The Inspector General’s report, dated July 17, 2015, and released
last week, said the system was built to faulty specifications. As a
result, it said, the system does not meet basic needs for “a
blood-tracking tool to ensure accurate blood inventory, patient
safety, and deliver high quality products to support the warfighter.”
It recommended halting further spending on the project until the
faults can be fixed.
Dwyer disputed the Inspector General's finding that the system could
cause shortages where blood is needed urgently. He said individuals
can correct problems and redirect blood if the system cannot
properly handle demand.
The report said no information was available on how much had been
spent on the project, and how much more it would cost.
The system was meant to automate the tracking of blood inventory,
beginning with individual donors through delivery and use in a
combat zone medical facility. It replaces a system that required
manual entry of data into Excel spreadsheets, which the report said
caused frequent errors.
The Defense Department in 2008 awarded the contract to build the
system to Akimeka LLC, a software unit of Alexandria, Virginia-based
VSE Corp. The report did not cast any blame on Akimeka, and said the
system’s flaws were due to faulty specifications from the Defense
Department.
Akimeka did not respond to a request for comment.
The report said the specifications omitted a list of essential
requirements that had been drawn up earlier. “There was no clear
connection from the user needs to the awarded contract,” the report
said.
The report said the new system was designed with another basic flaw.
The Pentagon is moving to integrate all medical records into a
single Defense Department-wide system. That system is being built to
replace scores of separate, antiquated computer databases. The
Theater Blood Application is incompatible with the new overall
database and so can’t feed information into it.
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The problem is consistent with Defense Department-wide faults in
adopting modern computer systems to replace thousands of antique
systems built with no coordination since the 1960s. Those faults
were detailed in a 2013 Reuters series titled “Unaccountable: the
high cost of the Pentagon’s bad bookkeeping.” As reported in that
series, waste from failed new systems has totaled billions of
dollars in recent years. The series can be read at reut.rs/1cH1F7I.
Battlefield injuries often require large amounts of transfused
blood. Surgeons say that sometimes more than the entire amount of
blood in a patient’s body has to be replaced before blood loss can
be stopped.
Trauma surgeons who spent extensive time in Iraq and Afghanistan
said a faulty inventory system could create blood availability
problems where there were none before.
Six surgeons said they had never experienced blood shortages in Iraq
or Afghanistan. The biggest problem, they said, was waste from
having too much stored blood, which ended up expiring.
Joseph Rappold, a former Navy trauma surgeon who served multiple
tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, said there was “40% to 60% wastage in
Iraq,” far more than in civilian U.S. blood banks. “This was just a
necessary evil, making sure there was adequate blood supply.”
The surgeons said that when blood stores ran low, they had a ready
supply from a “walking blood bank,” soldiers who lined up by the
field hospital to donate blood when needed. The practice has been
faulted because the blood isn’t screened for diseases that can be
transmitted by transfusions.
(Edited by John Blanton)
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