Massive Transfusion Research Paper

Patients suffering from severe injuries related to blunt, penetrating, and mixed trauma often receive a large number of blood products within the first 24 hours of hospital admission, a practice known as massive transfusion. Massive transfusion is typically defined as the transfusion of 10 or more units of packed red blood cells (pRBCs) within a 24 hour period (Rahbar et al., 2013). Though massive transfusion has been a common practice for decades, transfusion approach began to vary widely as transfusion medicine moved from whole blood transfusion to component therapy in order to better utilize this valuable and limited resource (Spinella & Holcomb, 2009). Research has shown disparate outcomes related to varying blood component (pRBC, plasma, and platelets) administration ratios (Cripps et al., 2013). Similarly, factors determining which patients are appropriate for massive transfusion as well as ideal timing for initiating MTP have yet to be fully elucidated. A small number of scoring systems are in common use; …show more content…
Medical informatics offers a number of tools that have the potential to drastically improve our understanding of hemorrhagic shock and effective use of MTP in the clinical setting. This review was conducted to identify and summarize current informatics solutions that could be employed to address knowledge deficits in this field and improve management of patients. Important themes that emerged were bedside-blood management system implementation to improve real-time blood product administration tracking, transfusion registry development to facilitate effectiveness analysis, predictive model generation to identify patient appropriateness and ideal blood component ratios/volumes, and clinical decision support tool integration to aid providers in complex decision