Thorsten Haas, M.D., joined us in November as director of patient blood management and professor in the Division of Multispecialty Anesthesiology. Dr. Haas joined us from Munich Municipal Hospital Group in Munich, Germany, where he served as a senior attending in pediatric anesthesiology.
Dr. Haas earned his medical degree from Johannes Gutenberg University in Maiz, Germany. He completed his anesthesiology residency training in the Department of Anesthesiology at Johannes Gutenberg-University, the Department of Anesthesia at Dr.-Horst-Schmitt-Kliniken in Wiesbaden, Germany, and the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at Innsbruck Medical University in Innsbruck, Austria.
Dr. Haas worked on the anesthesiology faculty at Innsbruck Medical University. He then joined Zurich University Children’s Hospital in Switzerland, where he worked as an associate professor and professor of anesthesiology from 2011 to 2021.
His research interests include point-of-care coagulation testing and perioperative coagulation management, with a focus on the use of coagulation factors during major pediatric surgeries. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed publications and he is a reviewer for 18 major anesthesiology and hematology journals.
Dr. Haas’ many contributions to the field include implementing a pediatric patient blood management program at the University Children’s Hospital in Zurich. He participated in a collaboration with a hemostasis research group in Innsbruck that led to three piglet studies, two clinical trials, three in vitro trials, and 16 publications in peer-reviewed journals. He has also collaborated with Boston Children’s Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, which led to the clinical implementation of viscoelastic testing (ROTEM) and clinical training at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
Dr. Haas was also involved in implementing ROTEM-guided bleeding management in major pediatric surgeries at the University Children’s Hospital in Zurich. This led to a randomized clinical study in children, which was published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia in 2015.
As a result of his activities in patient blood management, Dr. Haas has been invited to international conferences as an expert in pediatric bleeding management, coagulation factor concentrates for bleeding management, viscoelastic testing for bleeding management and patient blood management in children and adults. He is a member of the scientific experts group of the European Society of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, which published two European guidelines for perioperative bleeding management in 2013 and 2016. He is also a member of the Transfusion-Anemia eXpert Initiative – Control/Avoidance of Bleeding -TAXI-CAB, which recently published recommendations for the use of platelet concentrates and plasma in children.
Welcome, Dr. Haas!