Inpatient Venous Thromboembolism Prophylaxis: Overdoing and Underdoing

Many low-risk patients are receiving pharmacologic prophylaxis, and many high-risk patients are not receiving it.

Standardized scoring systems are available to risk-stratify hospitalized patients for venous thrombo embolism (VTE), but many low-risk patients receive pharmacologic VTE prophylaxis anyway (NEJM JW Gen Med Jul 1 2018 and JAMA Intern Med 2018; 178:1122). In a retrospective study of inpatient pharmacologic VTE prophylaxis at 21 Kaiser Permanente hospitals in northern California, investigators compared risk assessment by admitting physicians with risk assessment according to electronic health record (EHR)–derived Padua VTE scores (calculated only for the purposes of this study).

CR-NON-2024-00028