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Education Session

Clinical Transfusion & Patient Care

When TACO Isn’t on the Menu: Preventing TACOs and Finding the Reactions We’re Missing

AM26-SA-05-L - When TACO Isn’t on the Menu: Preventing Tacos and Finding the Reactions We’re Missing

Saturday, October 17, 2026
8:15 AM - 9:15 AM EST
Room: GWCC B405

    Program Chair(s)

  • Eric A. Gehrie, MD

    Deputy Chief Medical Officer
    New York Blood Center
    Rye, New York

    Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose.

    • Speaker(s)

  • Edina A. Wappler-Guzzetta, MD, PhD

    Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
    Boston Medical Center, Boston, MA
    Boston, Massachusetts

    Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose.

  • Nalan Yurtsever, MD (she/her/hers)

    Assistant Professor of Laboratory Medicine
    Yale School of Medicine
    New Haven, Connecticut

    Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose.

Disclosure(s):
Eric A. Gehrie, MD: No financial relationships to disclose.
Edina A. Wappler-Guzzetta, MD, PhD: No financial relationships to disclose.
Nalan Yurtsever, MD: No financial relationships to disclose.
Proposed Session Description: This session will explore the challenges associated with underreporting of transfusion reactions, particularly those that can be severe , such as Transfusion-Associated Circulatory Overload (TACO), and demonstrate cost-effective means to improve reaction identification and reporting to improve transfusion safety.
The first half of the session will outline the importance of clinician education and engagement, and the real-life experience of implementing a TACO scoring system and associated prevention strategies, available via the electronic health record at a university hospital. Examples will highlight the benefits and drawbacks of these implemented changes.
The second half of the session will focus on a real-life example of how retrospective datasets can easily identify serious and potentially underreported transfusion reactions such as TACO. Example cases will be presented to show how identifying unreported reactions improve the clinical management of the patient. The faculty member will also discuss what workflows have been put in place in the multi-hospital system to process the outcomes and implement practice changes.

Learning Objectives:

  • Enumerate the components of a new scoring system to estimate a transfusion recipient’s risk factor for TACO
  • Explain how to successfully educate clinicians on recognizing and preventing TACO
  • Describe how retrospective dataset has been used to improve recognition and management of TACO