Mayo Medical Laboratories, National Decision Support Co Offer Comprehensive Approach to Patient Blood Management

In 2010, the Rochester, Minn, campus of the Mayo Clinic implemented a patient blood management program that has since experienced a 35% reduction inblood transfusions, improving patient outcomes and achieving significant savings.

Using best practices from the program, Mayo Medical Laboratories, the global reference laboratory of Mayo Clinic, has recently collaborated with National Decision Support Co (NDSC) to combine Mayo’s clinical knowledge with NDSC’s expertise in electronic health record (EHR) clinical decision support.

Together, the partners have developed a new patient blood management program called CareSelect Blood. The program will assist healthcare providers with the appropriate utilization of blood products, improving patient care and reducing costs.

“With blood being a finite and expensive resource, we need to practice proper stewardship to prevent overuse,” says Daryl Kor, MD, an anesthesiologist and medical director for patient blood management at the Mayo Clinic. “Current studies indicate that 40% to 60% of transfusions are deemed unnecessary or avoidable.”¹

CareSelect Blood features 100 curated transfusion guidelines authored and maintained by the Mayo Clinic. The platform leverages data from more than 740,000 individual transfusion events. The guidelines can be integrated into a healthcare organization’s EHR within the physician’s workflow to ensure proper ordering.

CareSelect Blood also offers consulting services. “We have subject matter experts who will visit the healthcare organization to provide onsite training, review analytics and reports, and discuss the evidence-based transfusion guidelines,” says Kor. “This program can be customized to a hospital’s specific needs and tailored to various personas within an organization—for example, surgery, nursing, or the laboratory.”

“The problem is this: too many transfusions, too much waste, and an increased probability of adverse outcomes,” says Michael Mardini, CEO of NDSC. “By expanding our relationship with Mayo Medical Laboratories, we’re able to reduce variation of care, provide reliable standards, and report data needed to improve performance. This can lead to improved population health, increased provider efficiency, and lower cost of care.”

Development of CareSelect Blood builds on an existing partnership between Mayo Medical Laboratories and NDSC. In 2017, the partners codeveloped CareSelect Lab, a decision-support platform that aggregates clinical knowledge and provides real-time test-ordering guidance to physicians, addressing common areas of test misutlization.

“Mayo Medical Laboratories and NDSC continue to find ways to improve healthcare for providers and their patients,” says Mardini. “With our CareSelect Blood and CareSelect Lab solutions, we have designed programs that address many of the main concerns of healthcare institutions when it comes to patient care, health insurance costs, and the wasteful use of resources.”

For more information, visit Mayo Medical Laboratories and National Decision Support Co.

Reference

1. Shander A, Fink A, Jividroozi M, et al. Appropriateness of allogeneic red blood cell transfusion: the international consensus conference on transfusion outcomes. Transfus Med Rev. 2011;25(3):232–246.e53; doi: 10.1016/j.tmrv.2011.02.001.