A July USA Today headline screamed “Hospitals know how to protect mothers. They just aren’t doing it.” That was two months after Baptist Women’s Hospital won the Baptist Memorial Health Care President’s Quality Award for its efforts to prevent and treat the leading cause of maternal deaths—hemorrhage.
The Baptist Women’s Hospital team is developing a protocol to quantify blood loss for all patients. Evidence shows that cumulative measurement of blood loss is more accurate than estimating blood loss, and greater awareness of blood loss leads to early recognition of massive hemorrhage.
The team created a vaginal and cesarean calculator in our Baptist OneCare electronic health record to reflect the blood loss in the medical record. The blood bank and massive transfusion protocol order set can help staff quickly replace the correct blood products in the patient, based on the blood loss recorded in the medical record.
Baptist Women’s Hospital team members have presented this program to the Tennessee Quality Organization, the national conference of the Council for Women and Infants Specialty Hospitals and the conference of Obstetric Emergencies in Hanoi and Hue City, Vietnam.
To learn more about the program, click here.
