Hospital and Health System

UCSDMC Hospitalists ‘Set New Benchmark’

Blood clots that can develop in the limbs and travel to the lungs — hospital-acquired venous thromboembolism (VTE) — are the leading cause of preventable death in hospitalized patients. The Division of Hospital Medicine at University of California San Diego Medical Center (UCSDMC) has received national recognition for a program that protects hospital patients from developing those blood clots. The medical center’s VTE prevention team was awarded the Society of Hospital Medicine's (SHM) first-ever Team Approaches in Quality Improvement Award.

The VTE prevention team set out to find the best ways to prevent hospital-acquired blood clots and build tool kits that enable others to do the same. The SHM announcement of the award noted that the UC multidisciplinary team approach “substantially reduced the number of preventable blood clots and saved lives and money.”

Researchers developed a VTE prevention protocol, tested it, found it highly successful and published it for other centers to use. Under the new protocol, every new or transferred patient is evaluated for his or her risk of developing a blood clot and the appropriate measures are ordered. Nurses act as another line of defense and can help identify patients who might otherwise have slipped between the cracks as their bleeding risk or clot risk changed. The tool kit used by UCSDMC is now offered on the SHM Web site.

Now over 95 percent of UC San Diego Medical Center inpatients are receiving adequate clot prevention regimens and the number of UCSD patients who develop hospital-acquired clots has dropped by about 35 percent. That sets a new national benchmark.

Source: University of California, San Diego Medical Center, May 6, 2008