Reducing unnecessary crossmatching for hip fracture patients by accounting for preoperative hemoglobin concentration

BACKGROUND Maximum surgical blood order schedules were designed to eliminate unnecessary preoperative crossmatching prior to surgery in order to conserve blood bank resources.Most protocols recommend type and cross of 2 red blood cell(RBC)units for patients undergoing surgery for treatment of hip fracture.Preoperative hemoglobin has been identified as the strongest predictor of inpatient transfusion,but current maximum surgical blood order schedules do not consider preoperative hemoglobin values to determine the number of RBC units to prepare prior to surgery.AIM To determine the preoperative hemoglobin level resulting in the optimal 2:1 crossmatch-to-transfusion(C:T)ratio in hip fracture surgery patients.METHODS In 2015 a patient blood management(PBM)program was implemented at our institution mandating a single unit-per-occurrence transfusion policy and a restrictive transfusion threshold of<7 g/dL hemoglobin in asymptomatic patients and<8 g/dL in those with refractory symptomatic anemia or history of coronary artery disease.We identified all hip fracture patients between 2013 and 2017 and compared the preoperative hemoglobin which would predict a 2:1 C:T ratio in the pre PBM and post PBM cohorts.Prediction profiling and sensitivity analysis were performed with statistical significance set at P<0.05.RESULTS Four hundred and ninety-eight patients who underwent hip fracture surgery between 2013 and 2017 were identified,291 in the post PBM cohort.Transfusion requirements in the post PBM cohort were lower(51%vs 33%,P<0.0001)than in the pre PBM cohort.The mean RBC units transfused per patient was 1.15 in the pre PBM cohort,compared to 0.66 in the post PBM cohort(P<0.001).The 2:1 C:T ratio(inpatient transfusion probability of 50%)was predicted by a preoperative hemoglobin of 12.3 g/dL[area under the curve(AUC)0.78(95%confidence interval(CI),0.72-0.83),Sensitivity 0.66]in the pre PBM cohort and 10.7 g/dL[AUC 0.78(95%CI,0.73-0.83),Sensitivity 0.88]in the post PBM cohort.A 50%probability of requiring>1 RBC unit was predicted by 11.2g/dL[AUC 0.80(95%CI,0.74-0.85),Sensitivity 0.87]in the pre PBM cohort and 8.7g/dL[AUC 0.78(95%CI,0.73-0.83),Sensitivity 0.84]in the post-PBM cohort.CONCLUSION The hip fracture maximum surgical blood order schedule should consider preoperative hemoglobin in determining the number of units to type and cross prior to surgery.

COMPARISON OF TWO METHODS OF OPERATING THEATRE PLANNING:APPLICATION IN BELGIAN HOSPITAL

Operating Theatre is the centre of the hospital management＇s efforts. It constitutes the most expensive sector with more than 10% of the intended operating budget of the hospital. To reduce the costs while maintaining a good quality of care, one of the solutions is to improve the existent planning and scheduling methods by improving the services and surgical specialty coordination or finding the best estimation of surgical case durations. The other solution is to construct an effective surgical case plan and schedule. The operating theatre planning and scheduling is the two important steps, which aim to make a surgical case programming with an objective of obtaining a realizable and efficient surgical case schedule. This paper focuses on the first step, the operating theatre planning problem. Two planning methods are introduced and compared. Real data of a Belgian university hospital ＂Tivoli＂ are used for the experiments.