Haier Biomedical has taken its blood management business to ISBT Congress 2026 in Kuala Lumpur, positioning what it calls a full-process digital blood management platform rather than a catalogue of cold chain boxes. The company says the platform covers the whole workflow, from collection and component processing through low temperature storage, intelligent transportation and clinical application, with RFID as the identification layer that ties the stages together.
At the centre of the pitch are the RFID-enabled HXC-Series Automated Blood Management Refrigerators. According to the company, item-level tagging of blood bags allows instant location lookup inside the cabinet, bedside requests from the ward, electronic cross-matching at the point of transfusion, and retrieval times of under one minute. The cabinets use secure drawers with ozone sterilisation, and inventory counts and alarms are generated automatically rather than by a technician with a clipboard.
Deployments named by Haier Biomedical
Three sites were put forward at the congress. Daniele Pericolini, an automation solution specialist at the New Arcispedale Sant’Anna Hospital in Ferrara, Italy, presented that hospital’s move from paper records to R-Series Automated Blood Management Refrigerators, and reported full traceability with what the company describes as zero errors. Zhou Weidong, Haier Biomedical’s blood chain product manager, covered HemoRio Blood Bank in Brazil and the Asia Pacific Medical Center in the Philippines, both reported as running full digital tracking from the start of deployment.
Alongside the refrigerators, Haier Biomedical showed a plasma apheresis system certified to EU MDR, an automatic blood component separator and a plasma contact shock freezer. The company states that its U-Blood solutions are now operational in Germany, Italy, Thailand, the Philippines, Morocco, Brazil, Zambia and Kenya.
What the RFID architecture actually says
The U-Blood Network product page describes an IoT-based blood safety system intended to serve a whole city’s blood supply as one platform. RFID tags go on the blood bags, and the supporting hardware listed includes RFID read-write devices, RFID detectors and an RFID walk-in cold room. Coverage runs from collection and batch verification through storage, inventory, transport and cold chain tracking to electronic blood matching and real-time transfusion recording. That is a coherent chain of custody model on paper, and it is the direction most blood services have been heading.
What is missing is the detail a technical buyer would ask for in the first meeting. Haier Biomedical has not published a frequency band, a tag specification, an air interface standard or a reader model for any part of the system. Blood bag tagging in smart refrigerated cabinets is built both ways in this market, with HF at 13.56 MHz favoured for dense, close-range item-level reads in trays and drawers, and UHF used where longer read range and faster bulk inventory matter. Which route Haier has taken is not stated, so it cannot be assumed. The company also claims to be “the only company offering RFID tags with customized integration”, which is a strong claim in a market with several established blood bank RFID suppliers.
It is worth being clear about sourcing. This story rests on a single company-authored release, reprinted widely across the wires. Neither HemoRio nor the Asia Pacific Medical Center has published anything independently about the deployment, the Ferrara hospital’s own site carries nothing on it, and no RFID trade body has covered it. The claims here are Haier Biomedical’s own, and remain uncorroborated by the named hospitals and blood services.
Read more at https://www.haiermedical.com/u-blood-network/343.html
