SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Leading cardiac surgeons, anesthesiologists, critical care specialists and cardiovascular Intensive Care unit (CVICU) nurses will gather at the first dedicated heart surgery-focused Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS®) session held at a major cardiothoracic surgery specialty association meeting. The event will be held on Saturday, April 28th, 2018, during the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) 98th Annual Meeting in San Diego, California.
The organizing committee for the session includes Daniel Engelman, MD, Baystate Medical Center; Judson Williams, MD, WakeMed Heart and Vascular; Edward Boyle, MD, St. Charles Medical Center; Louis Perrault, MD, Ph.D., Montreal Heart Institute; Ali Khoynezhad, MD, Long Beach Memorial Hospital; Rakesh C. Arora, MD, St. Boniface General Hospital; Eric Roselli, MD, Cleveland Clinic; V. Seenu Reddy, MD, Centennial Heart & Vascular Center; Marc Gerdisch, MD, St. Francis Heart Center; Jerrold Levy, MD, Duke University; Kevin Lobdell, MD, Atrium Health; Nick Fletcher, MD, St Georges University of London; Matthias Kirsch, MD, CHUV Cardiac Surgery Centre, University Hospital Vaudois; and Gregg Nelson, MD, Arnie Charbonneau Cancer Institute.
This working group of key opinion leaders in the field, known as ERAS Cardiac Surgery, was formed only one year ago after recognition that Enhanced Recovery After Surgery efforts had not been formalized or generally available for cardiac surgical patients. The mission of the group is to optimize perioperative care of cardiac surgical patients through collaborative discovery, analysis, expert consensus, and dissemination of best recovery practices that will improve long-term outcomes and decrease complications and readmissions.
“We are building on past successes of the early pioneering efforts of heart surgery teams that developed ‘Fast Tracks’ to adopt the latest approaches of the now established ERAS pathways from other fields of surgery and tailor it to our patient population,” said ERAS Cardiac Surgery President, Dr. Daniel Engelman. “Past efforts in cardiac surgery focused mainly on getting the patient off the ventilator and out of the hospital sooner. We are now focused on not just the speed of recovery, but on quality outcomes and the patient experience throughout their operative journey until complete recovery months after discharge from the hospital.”
The group has been collaborating with experts from around the world to broadly solicit ideas for approaches to enhanced recovery, vet the published clinical data that support such approaches, and is currently working to complete a formal consensus manuscript of over 20 best practices that heart surgery programs can immediately implement to improve outcomes for patients. Some of the standardized approaches that are considered include: prehabilitation, to help more fragile patients prepare for surgery; pathways to better manage glucose, fluids; promote early extubation; new techniques for rigid fixation of the sternum; active clearance methods for chest tubes to prevent retained blood syndrome; use of biomarkers to prevent acute kidney injury; methods to minimize opioid use; and novel approaches to reduce postoperative delirium. This formal consensus work, along with other topics related to enhanced recovery after cardiac surgery, will be presented at this half day session during the AATS Annual Meeting on April 28th. The final work product will be submitted for peer review publication where it will be disseminated more broadly for implementation at leading heart programs around the world.
“Having expert, evidence-based consensus surrounding enhanced recovery has long been needed in cardiac surgery,” said Dr. Judson Williams. “This effort will allow us to consider the best practices from around the world to guide local process improvement for our multi-disciplinary cardiac surgical team and directly improve our patient’s outcomes.”
ERAS® Cardiac is a non-profit organization with the mission to develop evidence-based expert consensus statements promoting best practice recovery practices. The goal is to provide hospitals better guidance for developing local protocols that are part of a continuous quality improvement (CQI) process for better patient care and a reduction of postoperative complications and costs after cardiothoracic surgery (www.erascardiac.org). Focusing on cardiac surgery, the organization is collaborating with the broader ERAS® Society (www.erassociety.org), an organization that promotes enhanced recovery in many other surgical specialties worldwide. For more information about ERAS® Cardiac, contact: Alan Morasch, CAE via alan@eracs.org.