Saving Blood and Saving Lives During Time of Urgent Need Nationwide

Prime Healthcare and Accumen Achieve Success in Reserving Transfusions for Critical Care Needs

(ONTARIO, CA/SAN DIEGO, CA) – At Prime Healthcare, a partnership with Accumen is saving blood and saving lives during a time of urgent need for blood donations nationwide.¹ The program protects a vital life-saving resource and offers evidence-based guidance for clinicians, which has resulted in a reduction of unnecessary or avoidable transfusions while reducing costs amidst a climate where healthcare costs continue to increase.

Accumen, as a performance partner, developed a comprehensive Patient Blood Management program (cPBM) to improve patient outcomes and deliver value for the health system that includes 45 hospitals in 14 states. In just one year, the results of an enterprise-wide campaign to “Save Blood and Save Lives” drove a decrease of more than 11,000 units of Red Blood Cells (RBCs) being transfused and resulted in reduced transfusion-associated risk of HAIs (hospital-acquired infections), thrombotic events, transfusion reactions, mortality, and morbidity. Accumen’s team developed an evidence-based proprietary prioritization matrix to scale its PBM Program that included infrastructure development, clinical education and awareness, clinical guidelines, CPOE blood order builds and meaningful transfusion benchmarks and analytics.

“Prime Healthcare’s commitment to patient safety and evidence-based clinical care, coupled with Accumen’s comprehensive Patient Blood Management model, has resulted in an incredible partnership, profoundly improving healthcare quality across the entire hospital network within 12 months,” said Joe Thomas, BSN, RN, National Director of Clinical Optimization for Accumen. “Prime is the largest health system to implement a comprehensive program and achieve these incredible results in such an accelerated timeframe.”

“I applaud our physicians, nurses and all clinicians for their dedication to patient blood management and adhering to evidence-based guidelines,” said Sunny Bhatia, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Prime Healthcare. “This initiative has, most importantly, resulted in improved patient care and clinical outcomes.”

In a collaborative approach supported by Prime Healthcare’s leadership, a corporate PBM steering committee was established as well as a PBM Task Force at Prime Healthcare’s hospitals. With physicians and subject matter experts from Prime and Accumen, a new set of evidence-based transfusion guidelines was developed for implementation at the hospitals. Prime’s award-winning IT and EHR (Electronic Realth Record) team optimized its CPOE platform to accelerate blood order implementation across its system with multiple EHR platforms. Additionally, outdated blood supplier contracts were renegotiated to drive additional savings.

Prime is prepared to launch a new awareness campaign to promote Single Unit RBC ordering as a result of significant opportunity uncovered in cPBM analytics and benchmarking reports. In addition, multiple educational modules will be launched. An intense focus is planned to expand the review of transfusion metrics for the system’s hospitals. To sustain performance improvement, Accumen Performance Suite™, a SaaS technology solution, will be implemented for executives and hospital leaders to review real-time transfusion performance and outcomes.

For more information on Prime Healthcare, visit primehealthcare.com. For more information on Accumen’s Comprehensive Patient Blood Management program, visit Accumen.com.

About Prime Healthcare and Prime Healthcare Foundation

Prime Healthcare is an award-winning national hospital system with 45 acute care hospitals providing nearly 45,000 jobs in 14 states. Fifteen of the hospitals are members of the Prime Healthcare Foundation, a 501(c)3 public charity with a mission of providing quality, compassionate healthcare for all. Based in California and one of the largest hospital systems in the country, Prime Healthcare and its hospitals have been recognized as among the “100 Top Hospitals” in the nation 42 times and among the “15 Top Health Systems” three times, and Prime Healthcare is the only "Top 10 Health System" west of the Mississippi. For more information, please visit www.primehealthcare.com.

About Accumen Inc.
Accumen Inc. is a leading healthcare performance partner providing end-to-end strategy and services to drive value and sustainability for the clinical lab, patient blood management and imaging services. Accumen offers health system partners consulting, execution, utilization, and outreach solutions using a proven blueprint, innovative approach, and insight-driven proprietary technology. We partner with hospitals and health systems to set new standards of performance for healthcare delivery in speed, higher quality, increased patient safety, and a better patient experience that is sustainable. Accumen adds unprecedented value to its healthcare partners, helping them create healthier hospitals, and ultimately, healthier communities. Accumen® – Accelerated Performance Delivered™. Find out more at Accumen.com.

¹ According to the American Red Cross as quoted in TIME: http://time.com/5123867/red-cross-blood-platelet-donations/