Tiffany Hall: Why Hemoglobin Alone Is Not Enough Before Cardiac Surgery
Tiffany Hall, Director of cPBM Clinical Technology at hc1, shared a post on LinkedIn about a recent article by Kimberly Howard-Quijano et al. published in Circulation, adding:
“The American Heart Association just put a number on something many cardiac surgery teams already suspect: preoperative anemia affects up to half of patients and it’s tied to 3x the risk of death, 4x the risk of kidney failure, and 5x the risk of transfusion.
The harder number is this one: fewer than half of U.S. institutions consistently treat anemia before surgery, even though IV iron needs 6–8 weeks to work. By the time anemia is caught, the window to act on it is often gone.
A key blind spot: 20–50% of patients are iron deficient without being anemic, invisible to a hemoglobin-only workup, but still an independent predictor of worse outcomes.
The AHA is clear that ferritin, transferrin saturation, and CRP need to be part of routine preoperative testing, not hemoglobin alone and also important to note the diagnostic threshold for Hemoglobin of less than 13 g/dL for both sexes.
hc1 ClinicalIQ closes this gap by automatically screening every upcoming surgical patient’s labs against these thresholds, flagging iron deficiency even when hemoglobin looks normal, and routing at-risk patients to the care team earlier in the presurgical care pathway to optimize treatment time.”
Title: Perioperative Anemia and Patient Blood Management in Cardiac Surgery: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association
Authors: Kimberly Howard-Quijano, Linda Shore-Lesserson, Asishana Osho, Jacob Raphael, Jessica Y. Rove, Anil K. Panigrahi, Vicki Morton-Bailey, Anshul Kamlesh Vegrecha, Robert A. Baker
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