View article

Cardiac surgery is frequently complicated by coagulopathic bleeding that is difficult to optimally manage using standard hemostatic testing. We hypothesized that point-of-care hemostatic testing within the context of an integrated transfusion algorithm would improve the management of coagulopathy in cardiac surgery and thereby reduce blood transfusions.

We conducted a pragmatic multicenter stepped-wedge cluster randomized controlled trial of a point-of-care–based transfusion algorithm in consecutive patients undergoing cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass at 12 hospitals from October 6, 2014, to May 1, 2015. Following a 1-month data collection at all participating hospitals, a transfusion algorithm incorporating point-of-care hemostatic testing was sequentially implemented at 2 hospitals at a time in 1-month intervals, with the implementation order randomly assigned. No other …