The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to develop a hyper-personalized, clinical, and evidence-based blood transfusion decision support tool to reduce unnecessary transfusions, transfusion-related complications, and transfusion related expenditures. Blood transfusions are the most commonly prescribed medical procedure in the US, and cost our healthcare system $30 billion annually. The cost of unnecessary transfusions is estimated at no less than $15 billion each year. These figures double when including the cost of treating transfusion-related complications. In the era of evidence-based medicine, transfusion practices remain highly subjective with significant clinical variation.
The proposed project aims to address a critical un-met need in the hospitals related to blood transfusion by developing a comprehensive clinical evidence-driven decision support system that would empower the physician with a near real-time laboratory, clinical, diagnostic and prognostic information, integrated within a usable interface. The long-term goal of the project is to minimize the incidence of unnecessary blood transfusions to improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare expenditures. The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive patient blood-management suite of tools that can be implemented across all clinical fields and can be easily deployed in most any hospital. The following specific aims will be pursued: a) To develop and implement scalable HIPAA-compliant methodologies for the extraction, storage, and management of blood transfusion-related data from electronic medical record systems; and b) to derive patient-centered algorithms to create clinical decision support tools for the electronic medical record system and drive hyper-personalized blood transfusion practice. Successful completion of the proposed work may revolutionize the way physicians approach the decision to order a blood transfusion and ultimately change and eliminate the culture of over-transfusion. Subsequent widespread implementation throughout the US could save thousands of lives each year, on par with the goals of the Institute of Medicine?s initiative to reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing and medication related adverse drug events.
