About Antigen Plus
Antigen Plus AbID offers a range of advantages to your transfusion service or reference lab from inventory management to quality assurance to educational support. The primary feature of Antigen Plus has always focused on the time-saving way in which select panels can be composed using your current red cell inventory. This becomes an even more useful feature as many labs go straight from the initial antibody screen to a select cell panel to exclude any new antibodies. All resources are increasing in cost and no one can afford to waste panel cells or technologist time running cells to completely re-identify existing specificities.
Inventory Management, another means of controlling costs as well as meeting AABB IRL Standards requirements, is easily performed by Antigen Plus. The program generates reports of rare, frozen, and liquid cells in inventory. Rare cells are getting harder to find so a report that lets you know when stock is getting low can alert you to the need for searching for new sources of a rare phenotype.
The ability of the program to store results can be very useful for storing QC results, as Antigen Plus can store both antisera and rare cells in the Additional Antigen drop-down box. Storing daily results or a master panel for comparison can identify deterioration in antisera as well as inconsistency in interpreting results. You can manage technologist competency by saving a control panel of predetermined reaction strengths (0 – 4+) and using it as a standard for comparison against interpretations in your lab. Identification and exclusions (rule outs) can be determined by Antigen Plus and then compared to the results submitted by your staff to manage ongoing identification competency.
As a teaching tool, Antigen Plus can be used for both dry and wet workshop exercises. The dry workshop is an effective way to teach the principle of exclusions without wasting reagents or cells. Since many of us are called upon to teach other technologists and residents, Antigen Plus can accommodate all levels of antibody identification as well as the various red cell membrane treatments to test students.