Perioperative Blood Management Protocols Improve Outcomes: What Does the Future Hold?

This manuscript aims to review the current state of perioperative blood management as well as prognosticate future directions for the field. Perioperative blood management is a broad topic with a core tenet of conserving a patient’s own blood throughout the perioperative period. This manuscript provides an overview of the recent literature in this area and examines several treatment strategies to mitigate the risk of allogeneic transfusions. Some examples of topics covered include hemoglobin optimization, intraoperative techniques to minimize blood loss, and postoperative anemia tolerance and mitigation. In the modern perioperative arena, perioperative blood management is a vital strategy to enhance patient care with the goal of reducing resource utilization and achieving better outcomes. A focus on patient-specific risk factors as well as surgical context is important to optimize benefits from perioperative blood management.