Evaluation of a Clinical Decision Support System for Anemia Management in Pre-operative Care: Feasibility & Validation Study

The World Health Organization defines anemia as a hemoglobin level of less than 13 g/dL in adult men and less than 12 g/dL in women.

The cause of these anemias is most often deficient with 17% iron deficiency. This deficiency is related to age, inflammatory diseases, blood loss, and absorption disorders mainly. Anemia must be diagnosed preoperatively and treated.

To reduce transfusion in the perioperative period there are various possibilities: increase of the preoperative erythrocyte mass, reduction of losses, use of the blood that has been applied.

The impact of these preoperative strategies can be considerable. In their work, Beattie and al demonstrates that transfusion is associated with an increase in mortality at 90 days, proportional to the volume transfused, with certainly a higher risk in fragile subjects. More recently, an American registry of more than 220,000 patients showed that 30% had preoperative anemia. This anemia not only significantly increased mortality, but all causes of comorbidity were aggravated in an anemic patient.

However, the complexity of these recommendations leads to low compliance and to unnecessary and harmful per- and postoperative blood transfusion.