Blood transfusion in patients treated with surgery for necrotizing enterocolitis.

BACKGROUND: Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is a common surgical emergency in premature infants and has high morbidity and mortality. Intraoperative treatment with fluid and transfusions may be difficult. OBJECTIVES: We evaluated risk factors for patients who needed transfusion with packed red blood cells during surgery for necrotizing enterocolitis with bowel resection. METHODS: Retrospective medical and anesthetic record review of 206 patients who had necrotizing enterocolitis during 10 years at a pediatric referral center. RESULTS: In the 206 patients who had necrotizing enterocolitis, 88 patients (43%) had exploratory laparotomy, 67 with bowel resection. Of these, 50 needed transfusion of packed red blood cells in comparison with 17 who did not. Upon univariate analyses, patients who received packed red blood cells during surgery had significantly longer mean duration of surgery, lower preoperative hemoglobin and hematocrit, higher postoperative hemoglobin and hematocrit, more platelet transfusions, and greater estimated blood loss than patients who did not receive packed red blood cells during surgery. A binary logistic regression procedure revealed that the need for preoperative hemoglobin was found to be a significant risk factor for transfusion of packed red blood cells (odds ratio = 0.55; 95%CI = 0.36-0.84; P = 0.001). CONCLUSION: Patients having necrotizing enterocolitis with bowel resection are more likely to need preoperative transfusion with packed red blood cells, which may be more necessary when surgery is longer, preoperative hematocrit is lower, and estimated blood loss is higher.

Enhanced identification of eligibility for depression research using an electronic medical record search engine.

PURPOSE: Electronic medical records (EMRs) have become part of daily practice for many physicians. Attempts have been made to apply electronic search engine technology to speed EMR review. This was a prospective, observational study to compare the speed and clinical accuracy of a medical record search engine vs. manual review of the EMR. METHODS: Three raters reviewed 49 cases in the EMR to screen for eligibility in a depression study using the electronic medical record search engine (EMERSE). One week later raters received a scrambled set of the same patients including 9 distractor cases, and used manual EMR review to determine eligibility. For both methods, accuracy was assessed for the original 49 cases by comparison with a gold standard rater. RESULTS: Use of EMERSE resulted in considerable time savings; chart reviews using EMERSE were significantly faster than traditional manual review (p=0.03). The percent agreement of raters with the gold standard (e.g. concurrent validity) using either EMERSE or manual review was not significantly different. CONCLUSIONS: Using a search engine optimized for finding clinical information in the free-text sections of the EMR can provide significant time savings while preserving clinical accuracy. The major power of this search engine is not from a more advanced and sophisticated search algorithm, but rather from a user interface designed explicitly to help users search the entire medical record in a way that protects health information.