Blood Center looks to technology to sort donations

The Blood Center of Central Iowa is moving to make blood testing faster and more accurate. Center Executive Director Sheri Vohs says they’re trying to raise money to purchase an automated testing machine. The new system can complete tests on 160 samples in one hour compared to the ten hours it now takes to test 230 samples. Vohs says the current manual system leads to some donors being turned away due to false positives in the tests.Vohs says the new machine will cut down on the number of false positives. She says they’ve just begun the fundraising process.Vohs says they hope to be able to have the machine up and running by this time next year. The Blood Center of Central Iowa serves 26 counties and 22 hospitals.