Perioperative Surgical Care: A Robust Care Delivery Model

“Patient-centeredness” is a facet of healthcare that suggests taking the power out of the hands of those who give care and into the hands of those who receive it. Yet, it is not only about surrendering to patients’ requests. Rather it is about teamwork and trust among the clinicians, patients, and patients’ families.

In healthcare, patient satisfaction is most validly measured against the care delivered during and after the treatment. In the effort to improve health outcomes and reduce costs, healthcare organizations are increasingly focused on improving patient care and services by involving them as active participants in the process. The close coordination and access to updated patient records enable physicians to focus their efforts and converge all the network resources towards offering holistic care.

The diverse and fragmented care plans undertaken by different practitioners expose the surgical patients to face shortcomings in the expected care, and increase the chance for operational errors, often resulting in unnecessary care. To bring the process in sync the American Society of Anesthesiologists proposed the concept of the Perioperative Surgical Home as an innovative, patient-centered, surgical continuity of care model incorporating shared decision-making.

To bring the idea to fruition, it was important to align the preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative processes of patient care. Therefore, to bring coordination and value to the patient care delivery system, robust perioperative databases were created to explore new opportunities in the healthcare industry. The idea was to leverage the abilities of the entire perioperative care team in the service of the patients while promoting the standardization of clinical data that is easily consumable by any application or workflow.

Standardization of clinical assessment and management plans facilitates a driven approach that harbors localized individual and population patient differences while keeping up with the rapid growth of medical awareness.

Phases of Perioperative Care

In the perioperative process, the patient goes through three different phases: the preoperative, the intraoperative, and the postoperative phase. In each phase, there are different sets of responsibilities caregivers must undertake to ensure the patients’ safety and maintain the standard of care being given.

1. Preoperative phase: This phase begins from when surgery is decided until the patient is transferred to the OR staff/team. It includes a thorough patient assessment before proceeding any further. The assessment involves getting hands on the patients past medical history, surgical history, any allergies to medications, and making sure the patient fully understood what they were there for. The aim of the pre-procedure verification process is to make sure that all relevant documents, equipment, and information is available prior to the start of the procedure. This helps the caregivers with an understanding of the patient’s history, subsequently decreasing the risk of postoperative complications.
2. Intraoperative phase: This phase involves the time when the patient is transferred to the OR staff/team until the patient is admitted to the PACU. Here the patient is assigned a surgical team, with each team member having a specific role in the patient’s safety and care throughout the procedure.
3. Postoperative Phase: This phase begins when the patient is admitted to the PACU and ends once the patient is released from the physician’s care. Once in the PACU, the patient’s vitals are monitored every fifteen minutes, and as the patient wakes he/she is assessed for any pain they might feel. Inadequate assessment and management of postoperative pain can result in patient anxiety, insomnia, stress, and limited mobility. It is very critical to make sure that all those aspects are taken care of before the patient is discharged from care.

Conclusion

The interdisciplinary approach to patient care involves the entire perioperative team working together as one unit even though they are three separate segments. The systematic flow of all the necessary information on the patient from one phase to another ensures patients’ safety and care. To facilitate seamless insights for a comprehensive and coordinated care delivery digitally integrating the information from disparate sources, each operative unit, can enhance the quality of care manifolds by eliminating the friction for patients and refining patient satisfaction.

To know more about how patient-centric surgical homes can enable a seamless end-to-end care delivery, get a demo.

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