Jonathan H. Waters MD

Dr. Kevin H. Waters' areas of expertise primarily focus on transfusion management, blood salvage, and obstetrics. He has been federally funded to support investigations in these areas, with multiple peer-reviewed publications resulting, as well as five books on the topic of blood management and one book on neurologic disease in pregnancy. In addition to conducting research, he has served on the editorial board of the journal Transfusion and is the Associate Editor for the Blood Management section of the journal. He is a member of the Clinical Transfusion Medicine committee for the AABB and currently serves on the Committee on Blood Management for the American Society of Anesthesiologists. He is a Past President of the Society for the Advancement of Blood Management. Dr. Waters' research focus has been blood management and optimizing services that minimize transfusion. One of these areas is using intraoperative blood salvage. With this technique, shed surgical blood is captured, filtered, washed, and retransfused. In general, use of this technology in obstetrical hemorrhage has been contraindicated due to a fear of entraining amniotic fluid and causing an iatrogenic amniotic fluid embolism. With this work, he demonstrated that blood that is washed and filtered achieves a purity like that of the blood that is circulating in the mother. This was followed by a database analysis demonstrating safety. Currently, Dr. Waters’ research group is working on the safety of this technology in vaginal hemorrhage. Other research has focused on maximizing the use of computerized physician order entry systems to reduce overuse of allogeneic transfusion and to benchmark the use of allogeneic resources.