Red Cross Plans to Upgrade 53 Blood Centers

WASHINGTON — The American Red Cross will shut its 53 regional blood centers in sequence to install a new computer system and implement new blood-testing measures in an attempt to solve persistent safety and management problems.

The Red Cross board of directors Sunday unanimously agreed to the plan, which is estimated to cost $100 million and will result in regional Red Cross blood banks being closed on a rotating basis for several weeks each next year. In a statement, Red Cross President Elizabeth Hanford Dole called the plan a “complete transformation of the Red Cross blood program to address the problem of AIDS in the blood supply.”

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), who has been among the Red Cross’ most vocal critics, called the plan “bold and innovative.” He praised it as the most far-reaching move yet by the organization to respond to its critics.

The action follows repeated reports over the past several years of serious management problems at the regional blood centers run by the Red Cross, which handles half of the nation’s blood supply. In a series of inspections, the Food and Drug Administration found that the Red Cross had inadvertently released blood contaminated with hepatitis, failed to follow adequate safety precautions to guard against the use of AIDS-contaminated blood and repeatedly failed to report errors and accidents to the agency.

Red Cross officials said they hope the centers will not be closed long enough to result in regional blood shortages.

The reforms passed Sunday represent the organization’s attempt to modernize its infrastructure in a single stroke, replacing a set of management systems idiosyncratic to each of the organization’s 53 regional centers with a single, centralized system.

The first step is to install a compatible computer network for the entire Red Cross system, which now has 10 different computer systems in place. Red Cross officials have said the lack of a single system has made it difficult for the organization’s national headquarters to keep track of trouble-prone regional centers and to enforce uniform standards.

The plan also calls for centralization of blood testing. Currently, a small sample of each unit of donated blood is tested at each regional blood bank. But there is wide variation in the quality of testing at individual centers, so the Red Cross board voted to centralize testing at a number of larger facilities around the country.