Reducing Resource Utilization with Comprehensive Anemia Care

Anemia affects up to 40 percent of surgical patients, yet it is often overlooked and undertreated before surgery. Health systems across the country are relying on an outdated paradigm that considers anemia a relatively harmless condition. In other words, it’s not a big deal for patients, so why treat it? But the reality is, anemia is far from harmless.

Anemia is a modifiable risk factor that harms patients. When anemia isn’t caught or treated effectively, it can result in poor patient outcomes, unplanned transfusions, or cancellation of surgery – all costly challenges for hospitals.

For example, anemic patients almost always require a blood transfusion during surgery. Every transfusion adds an average of one day to a patient’s length of stay, raising the patient’s risk of getting a hospital-acquired infection (HAI). Additionally, anemic orthopedic surgery patients have twice as many readmissions and fail to bundle nearly 100 percent of the time.

Clearly, addressing anemia through a comprehensive anemia management program is critically important. But for resource-strapped health systems, launching an in-house program is not feasible. It requires significant investment in software and staff hours – and most of the time, DIY anemia management programs depend far too much on manual data entry, increasing the chance of errors and reducing the data’s utility for benchmarking process improvement efforts.

How to reduce resource utilization through comprehensive anemia care

Comprehensive anemia management begins with a smart, seamless technology platform that brings together disparate data elements and synthesizes them into a useable format. MyBloodHealth® – Accumen’s patented anemia management platform – does just that.

MyBloodHealth® features:

• A daily review that shows all of a health system’s anemia management patients on a single screen
• Individual patient assessment that incorporates all of an individual’s pertinent data points
• Patient visit documents and templates in one place
•  A complete patient communication record

With MyBloodHealth®, your health system can benefit in several ways, reduced blood product utilization rates; new infusion-related revenue opportunities; lower costs through enabling the hospital to retain more of its standard payment for procedure or bundled payment.

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Robust anemia management begins by asking the right questions. Accumen’s MyBloodHealth® Anemia Management Opportunity Assessment provides a valuable analysis to any administrator considering a new anemia management program or looking to accelerate an existing program.