Why providers transfuse blood products outside recommended guidelines in spite of integrated electronic best practice alerts.

Background: Best practice alerts (BPAs) provide clinical decision support (CDS) at the point of care to reduce unnecessary blood product transfusions, yet substantial transfusions continue outside of recommended guidelines.

Objective: To understand why providers order blood transfusions outside of recommended guidelines despite interruptive alerts.

Design: Retrospective review.

Setting: Tertiary care hospital.

Participants: Inpatient healthcare providers.

Intervention: Provider-BPA interaction data were collected from January 2011 to August 2012 from the hospital electronic medical record.

Measurements: Provider (free-text) responses to blood transfusion BPA prompts were independently reviewed and categorized by 2 licensed physicians, with agreement assessed by χ(2) analysis and kappa scoring.

Results: Rationale for overriding blood transfusion BPAs was highly diverse, acute bleeding being the most common (>34%), followed by protocolized behaviors on specialty services (up to 26%), to "symptomatic" anemia (11%-12%). Many providers transfused in anticipation of surgical or procedural intervention (10%-15%) or imminent hospital discharge (2%-5%). Resident physicians represented the majority (55%) of providers interacting with BPAs.

Conclusion: Providers interacting with BPAs (primarily residents and midlevel providers) often do not have the negotiating power to change ordering behavior. Protocolized behaviors, unlikely to be influenced by BPAs, are among the most commonly cited reasons for transfusing outside of guidelines. Symptomatic anemia is a common, albeit subjective, indication cited for blood transfusion. With a wide swath of individually uncommon rationales for transfusion behavior, secondary use of electronic medical record databases and integrated CDS tools are important to efficiently analyze common practice behaviors.