U-M, St. Joseph Mercy Hospital team up for statewide blood clot prevention initiative

The University of Michigan Medical Center is taking a leading role in a new state-wide initiative to prevent blood clots as a way of elevating patient care and cutting health-care costs.

"The main reason to target this is because it's a communal problem," says Dr. Scott Flanders, a professor of medicine at U-M and the director for this project. "Almost every patient who is hospitalized is at risk for blood clots."

U-M, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, and 15 other hospitals throughout the state are working together to take down the blood clot problem as part of the Value Partnerships, a long-term collaboration among health-care organizations aimed at improving quality in medical care. This specific initiative will focus on ensuring the state's major hospitals reduce the risk of blood clots by studying, benchmarking, and implementing the best practices to eliminate preventable blood clots.

"Our initiative is to prevent these things in the first place," Flanders says.

The first one to two years will be spent on an assessment of the problem and its various solutions. Picking low-hanging fruit could reduce the blood clot rate by as much as 50 percent in that time.

Source: Dr. Scott Flanders, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan
Writer: Jon Zemke