=========================================
Summary of context and overall objectives
=========================================
AT-Biotech Traceability Information Systems, S.L. (AT-BIOTECH) is a well-established Spanish SME that offers high quality RFID traceability solutions to its clients in the healthcare sector. We have already developed a system, Rhesus, that focuses in the blood donor-to-patient cycle. Rhesus significantly improves patient safety and blood quality, but also optimises the efficiency of all operational processes. At the time of writing this feasibility study, we have successfully identified ~251K products & patients, identified, stored and distributed ~232K blood components, and helped complete ~23K transfusions in our current installations in Spain and the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland).
Current traceability solutions are too paper based, and the introduction of new technologies, i.e. RFID is restrained because RFID-HF is too expensive, and RFID-UHF does not perform well with liquids (e.g. blood, plasma and most biological products). We have produced novel design of RFID-UHF antennas that solve these problems and produced a full traceability solution that covers all needs of traceability for the healthcare market.
TRACY, our innovative RFID-UHF traceability platform for human-derived products, is an evolution of our former Rhesus platform that will help us to up-scale our production and fully internationalise our business, while providing citizens and society important benefits:
1. Huge SAFETY improvement. We intend to achieve 75% safety improvement in the transfusion stage (blood products).
2. Huge PRODUCTIVITY and EFFICIENCY improvement. We intend to achieve 15% improvement in the production stage.
3. Huge QUALITY improvement. As a result of a thorough traceability and cold-chain control in the whole blood life’s cycle.
The overall objectives of this feasibilty study are validating the technical, commercial and financial viability of TRACY, where main areas of concern were:
1) Internationalisation.
1a) Make all necessary refactoring to allow for easy adaptation of TRACY to countries’ regulations (local changes to EU directives), agent/players’ protocols (e.g. German hospitals) and site-specific procedure (e.g. Spanish blood establishments).
1b) Improve our knowledge of the DACH market and better adapt our portfolio to the needs of the upcoming international clients (short-term focus on Spain and DACH region, but also the UK, France and Italy).
2) Production-upscaling and industrialisation. Carry out a thorough study to up-scale production (e.g. full industrial designs, specific country HW-SW certifications) of our full portfolio of products, which is currently mostly manufactured on demand, to evolve to a full automated mass-production industrial process to boost our profit margin.
3) Improve our reporting capability introducting machine-learning and big-data analytics.
