Connectivity in transfusion medicine: Challenges, benefits, and goals.

Transfusion medicine requires meticulous record keeping from the time a blood donation is made to the time a patient receives a transfusion. As such, blood collection establishments and processing laboratories generate large amounts of data. This data must be managed, analyzed, and visualized appropriately to ensure safety of the blood supply. Today, the use of information technology (IT) solutions for data management in transfusion medicine varies widely between institutions. In this report, blood center professionals describe how they currently use IT solutions to improve their blood processing methods, the challenges they have, and how they envision IT solutions improving transfusion medicine in the future.

Recommendations for procurement of starting materials by apheresis for advanced therapy medicinal products.

Activities involved in the production of certain advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs) require standardized approaches to mononuclear cell procurement to ensure the highest product quality, safety and process efficiency. These aims must be achieved while meeting regulatory and accreditation requirements for the procurement of mononuclear cells as starting materials. Mononuclear cells constitute the starting materials for many ATMPs, and this article sets out recommendations for procurement by clinical apheresis, addressing the variation among existing working practices and different manufacturers' requirements that currently poses a challenge when managing multiple different protocols.

Conference presentation in palliative medicine: predictors of subsequent publication.

OBJECTIVES: Concerns have been raised about poor-quality palliative care research and low publication rate from conference abstracts. The study objectives: to estimate the publication rate for European Association for Palliative Care research conference abstracts (2008) and explore associated characteristics and to understand reasons for non-publication. METHODS: Full published papers were searched to March 2015 (Medline; Pubmed; Google Scholar) and data extracted: country of origin, study design/population/topic. Multivariate logistic regression was used to identify predictors of publication.Members of two different palliative care associations were surveyed to understand reasons for non-publication. χ2 statistic was used to explore associations with publication. RESULTS: Overall publication rate of the 445 proffered abstracts was 57%. In the final model, publication was more likely for oral presentations (OR 2.13; 95% CI 1.28 to 3.55; P=0.003), those from Europe (3.24; 1.09 to 9.56; P=0.033) and much less likely for non-cancer topics (0.21; 0.07 to 0.64; P=0.006). Funding status, academic unit or study design were not associated with publication. SURVEY: 407/1546 (26.3%) physicians responded of whom 254 (62%) had submitted a conference abstract. Full publication was associated with: oral presentation (P<0.001), international conference abstracts (P=0.01) and academic clinicians versus clinicians (P<0.001). Reasons for non-publication included: low priority for workload (53%) and time constraints (43%). CONCLUSIONS: The publication rate was similar to 2005 clinical conference. Probable quality markers were associated with publication: oral presentations selected by conference committee, international conference abstracts and abstracts from those with an academic appointment. Publication was given a low priority among clinical time pressures.