Banking own blood is bad investment
By Daily Bruin Staff
April 16, 1995 9:00 p.m.
Banking own blood is bad investment
Study reveals the high costs of using autologous blood
By Dina Weinberg
Most people have heard that there are three ways to contract
HIV: through unprotected sex, intravenous drug use and blood
transfusions.
This information sends an erroneous message to the public
because contracting HIV or AIDS through a blood transfusion is only
a small part of the problem. In fact, statistics show the chances
of contracting the disease through blood transfusions are close to
one in 420,000 units of blood.
Banking your own blood before surgery became a growing practice
within the last decade because of HIV and AIDS fears. But,
according to a UCLA study done this year, autologous blood
donations provide little health benefit to the patient and are
actually more costly to the hospital or medical center.
"We have had a decade to learn about HIV. We know more about how
to interview people for risk factors, and the tests have become
increasingly safer," said Dr. Lawrence Petz, chief of transfusion
medicine at UCLA and an author of the report.
Screening processes are much safer and more thorough than in
previous years, making the chance of contracting blood-transmitted
diseases rarer.
Pre-operative autologous blood donations are more expensive to
collect and store than just using the community blood supply, the
report found. In addition, most of the unused blood is destroyed
rather than being made available to the general population.
Much of the cost of the autologous blood donations fall on the
individual hospitals. Medicare and many private insurance plans
have set fees for surgical procedures that prohibit hospitals from
billing separately for the autologous blood donations.
The survey comes at a time of changing health care and an
increasing pressure to limit costs. At UCLA alone, 11 percent of
the blood donations were autologous, and the percentage is
consistent with the rest of the nation.
The survey was done in order to determine the cost-effectiveness
of the procedure, Petz said.
"From a societal perspective, autologous blood donation does not
represent a very efficient use of scarce health care resources,"
said Dr. Jeff Etchason, the study’s chief author, in a prepared
statement.
By explaining the limited benefits of donating your own blood,
the study’s authors said they hope to cut down on the amount of
pre-operative blood donations, and therefore the cost to the
hospital.
The survey was done by researchers from the UCLA school of
medicine, the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center and
the RAND Corp.
