How Strategic Healthcare Group helped UAB close the gap

In 2007, The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital brought in Strategic Healthcare Group (SHG) as blood management consultants. The collaboration between UAB and SHG has resulted in an effective blood management program to optimize the use of blood products and improve patient safety. Since implementing SHG’s Strategic Blood Management Program, UAB has decreased pRBC usage by 25 percent to 29, 877 units for Fiscal Year 2011¹.

Marisa B. Marques, MD, the executive sponsor of the blood management program at UAB, decided to publish UAB’s experience with Strategic Blood Management to “show that change can happen” and how it happened for UAB with the help of SHG.

Along with a team from UAB, Dr. Marques wrote the article for Transfusion, “How we closed the gap between red blood cell utilization and whole blood collections in our institution,” describing UAB’s challenges with maintaining an adequate inventory and the accomplishments realized since implementing the Strategic Blood Management program. Dr. Marques notes, just as there are many authors to the article, there are many members of the team to make the endeavor a success.

Dr. Marques hopes other institutions will be inspired to take on blood management initiatives after reading the article, “We want to tell people, you can do it too, as long as you work together with the whole hospital.” Marques explains how SHG, as recognized experts, helped to wake up the physicians at her institution to work together. “Once someone considered a national expert came in, discussed the topic and then showed our results against a gold standard or a benchmark, it really made a big difference in terms of people believing that there was something they were not doing as well as they thought they were.”

“Strategic (SHG) was the catalyst for change.”

SHG was also a support system that UAB relied on for references, peer reviewed publications, and meaningful data, Marques explains. The BloodStat® Analytics data they provided, not only got physicians onboard, but also UAB administration.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital’s blood management program continues to thrive. “It was the most surprising thing that year after year, for 4 years, we are using fewer and fewer units of blood as if we continue to find the interest in doing it.” Dr. Marques feared the enthusiasm for blood management would decrease over time, resulting in a relapse of attitudes back to previous ways of transfusing as most commonly happens with new programs in hospitals. However, Marques credits the vitality of UAB’s blood management program to Strategic Healthcare Group’s comprehensive approach that helped UAB maximize results within the first few months, and the hardwired new way of thinking that have kept the savings going for years down the road. With “so many people involved in the beginning, we were able to change the culture.”

References 

1. Marques, M. B., Polhill, S. R., Waldrum, M. R., Johnson, J. E., Timpa, J., Patterson, A. and Salzman, D. (2011), How we closed the gap between red blood cell utilization and whole blood collections in our institution. Transfusion. doi: 10.1111/j.1537-2995.2011.03453.x