COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — A major jump in modern medicine for Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center has arrived. The hospital is among the first in the country to utilize brand-new technology that detects blood test errors instantly.
According to doctors, they’re using a new blood gas system to improve treatment accuracy and significantly reduce care costs. Dr. Robert Cooper with OSU Wexner’s medical department said they see upwards of 230 patients a day, and in high-pressure situations, decisions need to be made quickly and accurately.
He said in the emergency department setting, nurses have less time to get a perfect blood draw which can often lead to errors. The error the blood test system can detect is called hemolysis which refers to the destruction of red blood cells.
“In the past, it would take an hour, an hour and a half, to get that result of oh my gosh this sample is hemolyzed, these results aren’t accurate,” Dr. Cooper said. “And you just want to like hit your head because you’ve done all this treatment.”
Dr. Heather Stieglitz, co-director of clinical chemistry and toxicology, said hemolysis can falsely increase potassium measurements. Prior to the new technology, there was no way for doctors to detect if potassium results at the point of care, whether high, low, or normal, were affected by that error.
The new system now provides better context for doctors and allows for quicker decision-making. “The onus was really on the physicians to have to try to catch these samples by comparing the results to the rest of the clinical context,” Dr. Stieglitz said. “So, that inevitably would delay being able to properly interpret the results and could potentially delay proper treatment.”
The way the system works is quite simple. When a blood gas sample is collected, it gets brought to the lab. A probe comes out so the doctor can sample the blood, which only takes about fifteen seconds. The first thing the system does is a hemolysis check to see if there’s anything wrong with the sample.
Then it analyzes the rest of the data and results appear on the screen. “They would see if anything looked incorrect, if something wasn’t what they were expecting it to be, and they could exclude the results at this point so that they wouldn’t go to the patient’s chart or they could accept them and at that point the information would flow into the patient’s medical record,” Chelsie Ross, point of care consultant, said.
According to doctors, the technology is the first of its kind that’s available in an instrument that’s used at the point of care, allowing for more rapid decision-making. “If a patient has high potassium, they could go into cardiac arrest in a matter of minutes,” Dr. Cooper said. “When a patient comes in, the quickest way for us to get that potassium level is a blood gas. It comes back about five times faster than a regular blood draw.”
Dr. Cooper said prior to this, they would sometimes inaccurately treat patients due to these blood test errors. He said unnecessary medical treatment is never good.
“Rather than having to guess well I think their heart rhythm is because of this potassium, or I trust that this potassium is high, and we didn’t hemolyze it, now you have that accurate information, and you can take a deep breath and be like okay now I know what to do,” Dr. Cooper said.
Dr. Cooper said this new system also ensures the hospital isn’t spending money on unnecessary medicine because some treatments for high potassium can be quite expensive. He called the new technology a miracle of modern medicine.
“I’m very lucky to work at Ohio State that we’re one of the first places in the country to get this type of blood gas analyzer,” Dr. Cooper said. “I’ve worked out in the country out in rural Ohio and the pressure’s on and it’s a lot different because you don’t have access to these results and access to these devices so you’re frankly probably not as accurate as a doctor when you’re making those treatments.”