Ask HRC: Best Practices for Routine Collection of Umbilical Cord Blood

​A Healthcare Risk Control(HRC) member recently asked for guidance on best practices regarding routine cord blood collection for neonates. The member notes that testing cord blood can help clinicians to retrospectively ascertain the health status of the neonate, which can be helpful in understanding whether care contributed to an adverse outcome.

In our response, ECRI Institute notes that umbilical cord blood, once discarded as a waste product, has been collected for a variety of uses in recent years. In the guidance article Obstetric Liability: An Overview, we include a recommendation related to establishing a...