Reducing Errors with Blood Administration Transfusion Systems

The intention of implementing technology into healthcare practices is to reduce opportunity for errors in the delivery of providing health care. However, errors still occur, and many times are preventable. Configurations of health information technology systems should match clinical workflows to promote usage as intended. The purpose of this quality improvement project was to evaluate the impact of revised system configurations and use of a blood product transfusion system for the administration of blood products after one year of implementation. The method of heuristic evaluation is a usability engineering method for finding problems in a user interface design with the input of a small workgroup of subject matter experts. The project site had experienced reported incidents of blood product administration error as well as problems with systems communication since the implementation of the blood transfusion system. There were 31 nurse clinical educator staff users of the system who completed a survey evaluation of their perceptions of the blood transfusion system before and after configuration changes. The findings revealed that the mean quality and productivity score after the system configuration occurred was significantly higher than the mean score prior to the system configuration change, t (30) = −7.93, p < .001. The correlation between the one survey was also statistically significant, r = .46, p = .009. This project supports positive social change by reducing the potential for error for system users in the process of the blood administration process through heuristic evaluation through the implementation of changes to the technological system