This document is intended to provide guidance to blood bag manufacturers, their customers, and software developers on the bar coding of blood bags and their shipping containers. It deals with the relationship between information held in the GS1 carton codes and the ISBT 128 blood container label codes, and recommends ways to simplify the mapping between this information.

This document is intended to help facilities, label vendors, and software developers design appropriate ISBT 128 labels for blood products.

The purpose of this standard is to provide specifications of XML elements for use in electronic messages in order to provide information regarding MPHO in a consistent and standardized format.