ASL Frosinone, the local public health authority responsible for NHS-equivalent services across the province of Frosinone in Italy’s Lazio region, said in August 2026 that it will put a transfusion safety platform into service from October 2026. The system pairs RFID devices with barcode reading to confirm, at the patient’s bedside, that the right blood is going into the right person.
The platform is called Securtrasf and is supplied by the Italian firm Biotrac. According to the ASL announcement, it uniquely identifies the patient and then verifies the match between patient, blood sample, blood product and procedure at each stage of the transfusion process, rather than relying on a single check at the point the unit is hung.
The project was requested by Dr Carla Gargiulo, director of the UOC SIMT Frosinone-Alatri, the authority’s immunohaematology and transfusion medicine unit, and coordinated by Ing. Cataldo Loiodice, director of its digitalisation unit. The platform “will guide doctors and healthcare workers step by step in every single phase of the transfusion procedure, guaranteeing maximum safety directly at the patient’s bedside”, the ASL said in its announcement.
The error the system is meant to design out
The stated target is ABO incompatibility, which ASL Frosinone describes as one of the most serious risks in transfusion, capable of triggering a haemolytic reaction and death. As general background, wrong-blood-in-patient events of this kind are rarely laboratory failures. They are overwhelmingly identification failures somewhere in the chain: a sample tube labelled away from the bedside, two patients with similar names on the same ward, or a unit issued for one bed and administered at another. That is why bedside positive patient identification has become the standard countermeasure, and why it only works when the check is made against something physically attached to the patient rather than against a chart, a wallboard or somebody’s recollection of who is in which bed.
Barcode wristbands have carried most of that load in hospitals for two decades. RFID is used alongside or instead of them in blood traceability for the same reasons it appears elsewhere in the supply chain: no line of sight is required, a tag can be read inside a bag or through a sleeve, and multiple items can be resolved in one pass. Neither technology removes human error on its own. Both convert a judgement call into a machine-checkable one, which is the point.
What the announcement does not specify
For anyone assessing the deployment technically, the ASL statement leaves the important details open. It does not state the operating frequency or air interface of the RFID element. That matters more than it might sound. Read range and behaviour near liquids and metal differ sharply between frequency bands, and the choice determines whether a clinician can read a tag from arm’s length with a handheld or has to bring a reader within a few centimetres of the wristband. It also governs which tag and reader hardware the authority is locked into for the life of the system.
Nor does the announcement say where the tags sit. Tagging patient wristbands, tagging blood bags, or doing both are three different projects with three different cost profiles. Wristband tagging is a recurring consumable cost per admission. Bag tagging pushes the tag into a cold chain and, in most services, into a process the blood establishment rather than the hospital controls.
There is also no contract value, no tender or procurement reference, no supplier framework named, and no count of the hospitals or wards covered in the first phase. Biotrac states that Securtrasf is already in use in “numerous advanced healthcare settings” but names none of them, and the company’s own website could not be read at the time of writing because of an expired TLS certificate, so there is no published vendor specification to check the claim against.
Part of a wider digitalisation push
ASL Frosinone frames the rollout as one element of a lean management approach already under way across the organisation, describing the hospital as an integrated ecosystem of processes, technologies and organisational models oriented towards safety and patient centrality. In practice that positions Securtrasf as a workflow project with an identification layer attached, not as an RFID procurement in its own right, which may explain why the technical detail is absent from a public-facing announcement aimed at patients rather than at engineers.
With go-live set for October 2026, the useful questions are the ones the announcement does not answer: which frequency, tags on whom or on what, and how many wards. More on identification technology in clinical settings is collected in our healthcare coverage and our medical coverage.
