How to Automate SCC Soft Computer (SoftBank)
SoftBank.web automates the transfusion service internally: a master patient index surfaces history across facilities, online worksheets batch specimens and product modifications, instruments connect without middleware, and labelling prints ISBT compliant tags. Blood centre portals, recall notices and proficiency schemes sit outside it, and an agent such as WebRun reads those.
Written by
Clara Bennett
Revenue operations
Reviewed by
Devon Ruiz
Workflow engineer
The blood bank is the one laboratory that hands over a product
SCC Soft Computer has built clinical laboratory systems since 1979, and its transfusion service module is SoftBank, sold now as SoftBank.web. The name is shared with a Japanese investment group and means something else entirely here: this SoftBank runs blood banks, alongside SoftLab, SoftMic and SoftPathDx in the same estate.
A transfusion service is not like the rest of the laboratory. Chemistry reports a number. The blood bank issues a physical object with a patient's name on it, out of a refrigerator, against a crossmatch, with an expiry date and a retained segment. If the label is wrong the consequence is not a repeated test.
So what the system holds is unit by unit: what arrived, how it typed, who it is reserved for, what has been irradiated, split or otherwise modified, and what expires on Thursday. The people in it are bench technologists working type and screens and antibody workups, the supervisor who signs the wastage off, and a medical director who answers for all of it.
Everything outside the refrigerator arrives by telephone
Inside the building the system knows where every unit is. Outside it, a blood bank still runs on calls and emails.
Somebody rings the blood centre to ask whether the O negative order is coming today or tomorrow. Somebody reads a recall notice and checks it against unit numbers on the shelf, one at a time. Somebody chases a rare phenotype through a reference laboratory and then through two other hospitals. Somebody signs into the assessing body's site to see which evidence is still outstanding before the next visit. Somebody waits on a proficiency survey score that will appear on a portal with no notification attached to it.
None of it is difficult and all of it interrupts. It lands on people whose other job that hour is issuing blood.
SoftBank checks the crossmatch, not the supplier's order page
The system is deep where depth counts, and it is worth exhausting what it already carries before adding anything beside it.
A master patient index lets a technologist review a patient's history across facilities rather than one hospital at a time, which is exactly where an old antibody hides. Online worksheets support batch processing of specimens and of blood product modifications. Instrument integration connects analysers directly, with no middleware in between. Component labelling prints ISBT compliant labels for modified products, and supply tracking records what was consumed making them.
Around those sit multisite working, neonatal functionality that links a newborn to the mother, and emergency protocols that let several users work a trauma at the same time.
All of that concerns your units, your patients and your instruments, and it stops at the door. The blood centre's ordering portal, a manufacturer's recall notice, the reference laboratory's report, the assessing body's evidence list and the proficiency scheme's graded results are five websites belonging to five organisations, and none of them will build an interface for one hospital.
A recall notice matters only once it reaches the shelf
Those sites are all readable, and each holds something the blood bank needs before the next shift rather than after it.
The blood centre's order page checked each morning against what you asked for, so a short delivery of O negative is known at seven in the morning instead of discovered at two in the afternoon when a trauma calls.
Recall and withdrawal notices read as they post and matched against the unit numbers in your own inventory, so quarantine begins as a list of shelf positions rather than a person walking the fridges with a printout.
Rare phenotype availability checked across the suppliers and reference laboratories that publish it, so the hunt for a compatible unit starts from a shortlist. Graded proficiency results collected from the scheme's portal as they appear, against the method and the technologist who ran them. The assessing body's outstanding evidence items read weekly, so the gap before a visit is visible in March and not in the week itself.
No part of that is a laboratory decision. It is all done in a browser, on accounts the blood bank already holds.
Issuing the unit remains an act with a name attached
Reading a supplier's order page is not an accredited act. Issuing a unit is, and the distance between the two is the whole design.
WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in the way your staff sign in. It opens the blood centre's ordering page, a recall notice, a reference laboratory report or a proficiency portal, reads what is there, and hands it back as a list with unit numbers and dates against it.
A transfusion service leaves no discretion about this. Gathering runs unattended and as often as you want it to. Changing a unit's status, releasing a crossmatch, recording a reaction or writing into a patient record is prepared and held for a qualified person to review and release.
The workflows below each name the sites they open.
Questions people ask
Is an agent allowed to change a unit's status or release a crossmatch?
No, and it should not be. Release, issue and result verification belong to the qualified staff your accreditation names. A run reads outside sites and reports what it found, so the technologist spends the hour at the bench instead of on a supplier's order page.
A recall has to be actioned quickly. Is a scheduled run quick enough?
Set the schedule to match the risk. A recall page can be read every hour rather than every night, and the result comes back as unit numbers matched to your inventory, which is faster than a person reading a notice and walking the refrigerators.
Our transfusion service is inspected. Does an agent create a finding?
Nothing it does is an accredited act. It opens sites your staff already log into, on a schedule you set, restricted to the domains you name, and it records what each page said. Every decision about a unit or a patient is still made and signed by your own people.
12 ready-made SCC Soft Computer (SoftBank) workflows
Each one names the apps it touches and the exact steps it takes. Open one to read what it will do, then turn it on.
Want one of these running on your own SCC Soft Computer (SoftBank)?
Show WebRun the process once and it will run it on schedule, in your own private browser environment.