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Count the number Red Blood Cell (RBC) Transfusions per encounter

n_rbc_transfusions.Rd

This function calculates the number of appropriate transfusions and total of all transfusions per encounter. The definition of an appropriate transfusion can be found on the sample My Practice Report. A transfusion is defined by procedure in the below codes:

  1. 4144461.

  2. 4137859

  3. 4022173

An appropriate transfusion also requires that the patients pre-transfusion hemoglobin levels are below 80 g/L. The Athena definition of a hemoglobin test: 3000963

Red blood cell transfusions with no hemoglobin measurement within 48 hours prior to the transfusion are excluded. These scenarios are rare, typically occurring in approximately 2% of blood transfusions in GEMINI data.

Usage

n_rbc_transfusions(dbcon, cohort, exclude_ed = FALSE)

Arguments

dbcon

(DBIConnection)
A database connection to any GEMINI database. Only DBI connection is accepted as odbc connection may cause connection issues in certain environment.

cohort

(data.frame or data.table) Cohort table with all relevant encounters of interest where each row corresponds to a single encounter. Must contain the following columns:

  • genc_id (integer): GEMINI encounter ID

  • hospital_num (integer): Hospital number

exclude_ed

(logical) Whether to exclude transfusions in emergency department. When set to TRUE, transfusions performed in ED (before admission time) will not be counted. When set to FALSE, transfusions will not be filtered by time and all RBC transfusions in transfusion table will be counted. Please be aware that this may include transfusions before triage time, transfusions after discharge time, and transfusions without issuing time.

Transfusions in ED are defined as issue_date_time earlier than admission_date_time. Transfusions with missing issue_date_time will be excluded when exclude_ed is set to TRUE.

Value

(data.table)
Table with three columns: genc_id, n_app_rbc_transfusion_derived (number of appropriate RBC transfusions), and n_rbc_transfusion_derived (total of all RBC transfusions). Encounters without any transfusion will get a 0.

Note

Transfusion data from two hospitals with known data quality issues are automatically removed by this function. Any genc_ids from those sites are not included in the returned output. When merging the output of this function with another table, those genc_ids should have a value of NA.

Currently, the function does not take transfusion or lab data coverage into account. For patients without RBC transfusion, the function will return 0 in result columns. User should check transfusion and lab data coverage and decide whether the imputed 0s are appropriate or not.