A national biovigilance network is a vital and urgent project to enhance patient safety and reduce healthcare costs.

The U.S. Biovigilance Network will, for the first time on a nationwide basis, collect and analyze data to identify trends and recommend best practices to reduce adverse reactions and incidents associated with blood transfusion and related biological therapies. Ultimately, the analyses of this data will enhance patient safety, make better use of blood and biological therapies, and reduce healthcare costs.

Major anticipated outcomes of the Network include:

·          Improving patient and donor outcomes.

·          Reducing risk for hospitals, collection centers and others participating in the transfusion process.

·          Reducing costs of transfusion process by eliminating errors and waste where possible.

·          Improving the policies, processes and procedures for transfusing blood, tissues and cells.

·          Identifying trends that adversely affect patients and donors and designing interventions to mitigate those trends.

·          Continuously improving quality for participating facilities through benchmarking.

·          Developing evidence-based responses to support community efforts addressing public health concerns of the federal government.

The Network is a unique public/private collaboration with shared responsibilities for program development, operation and management, and funding. The federal government, through the Department of Health and Human Services, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has provided the platform for initial surveillance efforts through its National Healthcare Safety Network. The U.S. Biovigilance Network has raised $1 million in private contributions to fund the initial expenses and is seeking $2 million in additional support to complete development and implement the program.

The U.S. Biovigilance Network will be a series of Web-based electronic surveillance systems. They are being carefully designed to interface with existing data collection systems to avoid duplicate data entry. The two systems in development are:

·          The transfusion recipient system (anticipated Fall 2008)

·          The blood donor system (anticipated Fall 2008)

The pilot will be implemented with nine hospitals across the country. This will allow for fine-tuning of the surveillance system and analysis of initial data collected. Additional organizations are voluntarily registering to contribute data, with full participation and system launch anticipated in 2009.

View the U.S. Biovigilance Network launch press release