BD Announces Launch of New Fast Clotting Blood Collection Tube

BD today announced the launch of BD Vacutainer® Rapid Serum Tube, a blood collection device designed to help acute healthcare facilities rapidly analyse blood serum for patient diagnosis. The BD Vacutainer® Rapid Serum Tube features the BD Hemogard™ safety-engineered closure, which enhances healthcare worker safety as well as compatibility with clinical analysers utilising front-end automation .

"Blood test results drive many important medical decisions, including how to treat or medicate patients,” said Ana Stankovic, MD, PhD, MSPH, Vice President, Medical and Scientific Affairs and Clinical Operations for BD Diagnostics - Preanalytical Systems. “Technologies such as the BD Vacutainer® Rapid Serum Tube can help reduce the time it takes to get answers from blood tests and have a significant impact on patient care and hospital productivity.”

With a five-minute clotting time and as little as three minutes of centrifugation (at 4000 g), the BD Vacutainer® Rapid Serum Tube can offer savings of up to 32 minutes of laboratory time . Standard serum separator tubes require a 30-minute clot time followed by 10 minutes of centrifugation before clinical laboratory professionals can begin analysing the sample and getting test results.

“By taking essentially one sixth of the time of standard serum tubes to clot, the BD Vacutainer® Rapid Serum Tube is poised to help facilities significantly improve patient throughput, especially in places like emergency rooms where decisions to admit or treat patients are often based on blood test results ,” said Stankovic.

The 5 ml-draw, 13x100ml plastic sterile blood-collection tube combines a thrombin-based additive with gel technology, which creates a high quality serum sample by minimising fibrin formation and haemolysis. Haemolysis and clotted specimens are two common examples of sub-optimal quality, both of which can lead to laboratory errors . Studies conducted by BD show a 59 percent reduction of haemolysis and fibrin strand formation in the BD Vacutainer® Rapid Serum Tube versus the serum control tube . This observed sample quality improvement may help lower the number of repeat collections by phlebotomy, which in turn can increase the productivity of the laboratory.