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How Leading Hospitals are Developing Protocols to Proactively Maintain Chest Tube Patency after Heart Surgery:  Improving outcomes and reducing hospital costs is a continual effort in modern healthcare. For heart surgery patients, a good place to start is by focusing on something that is common to nearly all recovering patients. All cardiac surgery patients have some degree of post-operative bleeding and chest tubes are required to evacuate this blood…

Bleeding is one of the most common and expensive complications after heart surgery. When a patient hemorrhages not only does it impact patient clinical outcomes, the hospital hemorrhages money in un-recouped costs to manage the ensuing complications. A big driver of these costs is Retained Blood Syndrome (RBS). Blood is evacuated by drainage systems in the early hours after surgery until the bleeding stops. RBS occurs when the blood…

All patients bleed in the early hours after heart surgery. The post-operative blood shed into the chest is drained through chest tubes and collected in drainage canisters. For some this is just a few hundred cc’s and then it stops. For others it can be more than a liter. In these early hours after surgery great efforts are taken to support the patient until coagulation is restored and…

Drainage systems are used to evacuate blood from around the heart and lungs after cardiac surgery. When the drainage capacity is impaired, for example by obstruction from chest tube clots, then blood is retained around the heart (pericardial space) and lungs (pleural spaces). Blood that is retained in these spaces causes a host of complications called Retained Blood Syndrome  (RBS), often impairing patient recovery. Retained blood clot drives…

Heart surgeons and their teams are often faced with a dilemma: They put in and manage chest tubes to drain shed blood from around the heart and lungs after heart surgery. This is because all patients bleed for a few hours after heart surgery until they are stabilized in the ICU. But now it’s been shown that up to 36% of these chest tubes clot off in the early hours after…

ClearFlow Executives Comment on New Data Anaheim, CA – March 25, 2015—Cardiac anesthesia investigators from Germany presented data this week at the International Anesthesia Research Society’s (IARS) 2015 Annual Meeting and International Science Symposium in Honolulu, HI. Critical care specialists from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin’s Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine presented clinical data from 6,909 patients.

Joel Dunning from CTSNet talks with Marc Gillinov, cardiac surgeon and Surgical Director of the Center for Atrial Fibrillation at Cleveland Clinic. In this interview, Mr. Dunning and Dr. Gillinov discuss mitral valve repair through minimally invasive and robotic techniques. Dr. Gillinov details his techniques for mitral valve repair, from the placement of the incision to resection and closure. Dr. Gillinov stresses the importance of customizing techniques and approaches…