Introducing - Strategic Healthcare Group, LLC
The Editorial Staff at NoBlood.org are gratified when we can highlight thought and action leaders from the field of Blood Management. We recently asked Dr. Tim Hannon, M.D. MBA and Founder and President of Strategic Healthcare Group to tell us about his company.
Strategic Healthcare Group, LLC (SHG)
is a company of doctors, nurses and program managers with a single purpose: improve patient care by exposing doctors and nurses to the science behind the practice of blood management. The SHG team has decades of blood management program experience, passion for healthcare quality improvement and dedication to patient safety. Because SHG clinicians are experienced care providers, SHG shares a patient-centered focus with the hospitals that employ SHG’s Strategic Blood Management™ system. SHG’s highly successful impact on improving healthcare while reducing costs was detailed by the University of Alabama at Birmingham in a peer-reviewed journal article, dated December 2011.
Blood management is an evidence-based process designed to promote the optimal use of blood and blood-related resources. The goal of blood management is to ensure each and every transfusion is appropriate. The science behind blood management has grown significantly in the past decade and continues to develop rapidly. Physicians and nurses at SHG work closely with the physicians and nurses at client hospitals
, presenting current evidence and facilitating process changes. The SHG program managers provide analytics that identify opportunities for improvement and establish benchmarks for improving patient care.
The Strategic Blood Management™ system employs proprietary informatics tools to deliver blood analysis, education and knowledge for ongoing success.
- Blood Management University® provides evidence-based education where physicians, health executives, nurses and laboratory professionals access a formal curriculum on blood component therapy and transfusion administration online, engage in bi-monthly live interactive webinars and attend Blood Management University® workshops in Indianapolis Indiana.
- Blood Management Exchange® is the knowledge management section that contains a repository of select peer-reviewed abstracts and program resources such as communications tools, policy guides and best practice templates.
- BloodStat® Analytics is the proprietary data management component that gathers data from disparate hospital systems (clinical, laboratory, financial) to identify opportunities for clinicians to reduce unnecessary blood product transfusions.
The technological components are supported by a professional services team comprised of physicians, nurses, risk/quality management specialists, program managers and data analysts. The experienced clinical staff and program support staff use Lean Six Sigma principles to assist hospitals to reduce unnecessary transfusions, which improves the quality of patient care and results in millions of dollars of cost savings. To date, SHG’s strategies and services have delivered in excess of $234 million in value to our clients and have measurably improved patient outcomes.
The primary benefits of the Strategic Blood Management solution are:
- Better patient health
- Improved quality of care
- Lower healthcare costs
Optimizing the patient’s health prior to elective interventions reduces the risk for transfusion and for mortality. The Strategic Blood Management™ system educates care providers to screen and treat previously undiagnosed anemia prior to exposing the patient to surgical blood loss which improves the patient’s overall health and reduces postoperative complications.
Hospitals with comprehensive blood management programs provide safer, higher quality care because “blood transfusion carries significant risk that may outweigh its benefits in some settings.” The Strategic Blood Management™ program employs evidence-based transfusion criteria to reduce variability in transfusion practice and multidisciplinary clinical teams to develop, implement and assure the success of blood management improvement projects.
Unnecessary blood transfusions mean unnecessary health care costs. These unnecessary blood-related costs are often incurred by Medicare, Medicaid and uninsured patients who receive 59% of all blood products. Hospitals using Strategic Blood Management™ solutions have reduced unnecessary blood transfusions by 13% to 37% resulting in millions of dollars in cost savings.