Epidemiology is the study of disease occurrence and risk factors for disease. Health outcomes research seeks to measure the actual results of medical treatments and interventions by combining clinical data, and donor or patient information obtained by surveys, with functional measurements of effects. These data may also include the financial costs of interventions. At Vitalant Research Institute, we study transfusion outcomes using vein-to-vein databases. These large databases link blood donor characteristics, blood component processing, and electronic health record data from patients to assess risks of transfusion and the effectiveness of transfusion therapies.
We advance this research thanks to volunteer blood donors within Vitalant and collaborate with external partners including hospitals on multicenter studies involving both donors and blood recipients.
The epidemiology group at the Research Institute strives to ensure a safe and sufficient blood supply by supporting epidemiology, health outcomes research, and operational initiatives requiring expertise in clinical research, epidemiology, statistics and machine learning across the Institute, Vitalant, Creative Testing Solutions and others. Our transfusion outcomes research services also include data coordinating and analytics for projects.
