The Barcelona Hospital Clínic therapeutic apheresis database.

INTRODUCTION

A therapeutic apheresis (TA) database helps to increase knowledge about indications and type of apheresis procedures that are performed in clinical practice. The objective of the present report was to describe the type and number of TA procedures that were performed at our institution in a 10-year period, from 2007 to 2016.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

The TA electronic database was created by transferring patient data from electronic medical records and consultation forms into a Microsoft Access database developed exclusively for this purpose. Since 2007, prospective data from every TA procedure were entered in the database.

RESULTS

A total of 5940 TA procedures were performed: 3762 (63.3%) plasma exchange (PE) procedures, 1096 (18.5%) hematopoietic progenitor cell (HPC) collections, and 1082 (18.2%) TA procedures other than PEs and HPC collections. The overall trend for the time-period was progressive increase in total number of TA procedures performed each year (from 483 TA procedures in 2007 to 822 in 2016). The tracking trend of each procedure during the 10-year period was different: the number of PE and other type of TA procedures increased 22% and 2818%, respectively, and the number of HPC collections decreased 28%.

CONCLUSION

The TA database helped us to increase our knowledge about various indications and type of TA procedures that were performed in our current practice. We also believe that this database could serve as a model that other institutions can use to track service metrics.