The main aim of this application is to provide a useful tool for health professionals (anesthesiologists, critical care and emergancy physicians...) in order to get estimated values of patient bleeding, with high and probably accuracy enough, from a clinical point of view, thus to make appropriate treatment decisions, together with other signs and symptoms in a clinical context.
The formulas used in this application are not yet clinically validated, so it shold be limited to research and validation porpose.
The reason that inspires the development of this bleeding calculator is twofold:
1- The patient bleeding assessment based on objetive data (The quantity of drainage: surgical aspirators, gauzes, compresses, blood over the operating room floor...) is not accurate enough, and it tends to underestimate the bleeding calculation. It doesn´t include the hidden bleeding in soft tissues, cavities...
2- The are many mathematical formulas to calculate the patient bleeding, based on analytic parameters. None of them has demonstrated to get a very high accuracy. All of them asuume that patient´s blood volume remains constant. This premise does not have necessary to be true in all cases, since it depends on the correct replacement of intravascular blood volume, parallel and consistent with bleeding. This situation of intravascular euvolemia, equaling the previous values at the start of bleeding, in general is often not achieved until 48-72 hs after surgery.
Given this need for a useful tool in the operating room, or in hospital setting, designed to show during the early hours of bleeding, we offer this application, in order to be assessed and evaluated by professionals who wish to improve clinical practice. This tool could obtain a high beneficial impact on the blood transfusion management, and also in the environment of blood conservation programs.