Benchmarking and Quality

The Challenge

National hemovigilance in the United States was established in 2010 as a voluntary reporting system for hospital transfusion services through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network Hemovigilance Module (NHSN). To provide support and feedback to hospitals, AABB established a Patient Safety Organization, AABB Center for Patient Safety (CPS), for hospitals reporting to NHSN to receive input on their hemovigilance and patient safety reports. U.S. Patient Safety Rules and regulations established by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) requires AABB’s CPS to provide direct feedback and assistance to healthcare providers to minimize patient risk and to promote a culture of safety.

The Solution

AABB engaged Dovel to develop an IT solution that provides CPS member hospitals the ability to access, submit, interact with, and consume confidential and protected hemovigilance data and reports. The secure and interactive CPS web portal was launched in 2015 for use by the 85+ AABB CPS member hospitals. The cloud-based portal has multiple interactive capabilities, including collection of supplemental information linked to transfusion reaction reports, delivery of confidential and protected comparative benchmark reports using data from the CDC NHSN addressing adverse transfusion reactions and patient safety events, notification of upcoming events, and provision of targeted educational material.

Client Results

A national hemovigilance system that relies on voluntary reporting may be challenged for consistent hospital participation. Through the delivery of valuable metrics and resources, the AABB CPS incentivizes hospital members to participate. The secure web portal provides the enhanced and timely feedback needed to encourage consistent participation and accurate reporting. Additionally, the portal has drastically reduced the time required to generate the quarterly benchmark reports thus improving the value add for participating hospital members.