EDITOR NOTE- This content originally appeared on WMBD-TV on March 4, 2024. Dr. Michael Tarantino has been recognized as a CI Hero during Bleeding Disorders Awareness Month. To view the original article, please visit WMBD’s web story.

Treating and caring for the whole patient. That’s what’s happening inside the Bleeding and Clotting Disorders Institute in Peoria.

“We’re going to do everything we can to make their life better,” said Dr. Michael Tarantino. “The quality of their life is so much more important. It’s not just their blood count or their platelet count that we want to fix. We want to make their life better.”

Dr. Tarantino founded BCDI in 2010. He, along with his partners, ushered in an idea to be on the cutting edge side of treatments and research.

“Since 2010, [we’ve been in] well over 100 publications and medical journals including the first ever publication in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, which is sort of the British version of that to feature authors from the Peoria area,” said Dr. Tarantino.

BCDI is the only nonprofit federally funded in downstate Illinois that provides Hemophilia treatment and guidance to more than 7,000 people across 24 states.

“We focus our attention, our career, our reading, our research, our clinical expertise, on the blood,” said Dr. Tarantino. “I think it’s pretty fitting that not just the doctors here, not just the advance practice providers, but our nurses, our social worker, all of our allied health people, our business people, are all in one way or another, blood experts.”