Recently you may have heard of the push to have COVID-19 survivors donate their plasma in an attempt to treat those who are currently afflicted by the virus. The idea behind this experimental treatment, as described by CNN, is that antibodies in the blood plasma of recovered patients could potentially help people fight off COVID-19.
Plasma comprises about 55% of your blood composition and it carries salts and enzymes. It also carries “antibodies, clotting factors, and the proteins albumin and fibrinogen,” according to Stanford Children’s Hospital. The components that plasma carries can be isolated from the rest of the plasma and used to help treat medical conditions.
Without a COVID-19 vaccine, it is crucial that doctors and scientists use all the tools at their disposal to try to treat this virus. The antibodies found in plasma donations from recovered COVID-19 patients could be a very valuable resource in ending this pandemic. Therefore, it is crucial to have a tool that can organize the process of collecting and managing blood plasma.
Veoci’s Solution
A large healthcare organization based in Connecticut needed a way to collect data on people who were interested in donating plasma. They created two Veoci Forms – one in English and one in Spanish – that prompted interested parties (i.e. people who had tested positive for COVID-19, then tested negative after 28 days, and who were asymptomatic) to apply for plasma donation.
Once these Forms were created and operational, the organization had 170 sign ups in a short amount of time with very minimal socialization around the Form. They realized that they could take this data collection a step further by thinking about the complete process.
Veoci stepped in and leveraged our expertise to assist in the creation of a Workflow, which would guide this organization through the process of not only collecting data on people who were interested in donating, but then screening them to see if they were solid candidates.
The benefit of this solution, besides streamlining plasma donation, is that it’s a process that can be applicable to everyone. It’s composed of generic questions that can be pushed to other organizations easily with minor tweaks to adapt to varying processes.
It also aligns with trends in healthcare. The collection of data samples and the process behind assessing the quality of said sample is a need that will exist long after COVID-19 is behind us.
Establishing the process now when people are looking for a way to give back and help through things like blood donations is crucial, but these processes will help you when you return to normalcy as well.
Working Together for a Cure
As scientists and healthcare professionals work to discover a cure for COVID-19, it’s important to do all that we can to help facilitate this process. Plasma donation by recovered patients can greatly help the cause, but there needs to be a system of organization that helps facilitate and streamline the donation process.
