A study suggests that blood utilization data from an electronic anesthesia information management system can be used to assess institutional blood requirements and optimize the process of preoperative blood ordering. Preoperative blood orders are typically determined using a maximum surgical blood order schedule (MSBOS). Data from 53,526 patients undergoing 1,632 different surgical procedures were used to develop a novel algorithm to create an updated institution-specific MSBOS for 135 different procedure categories. Among the surgical cases where preoperative blood orders were not required, 32.7% had a type and screen ordered, and 9.5% had a cross-match ordered. Researchers suggest that use of the updated MSBOS to guide preoperative blood ordering may eliminate unnecessary blood orders and lead to a potential cost savings of over $211,000 per year.
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