EDUCATIONAL WEBINAR: Evidence-Based Strategy in the Prevention of Complications due to Retained Blood

An Educational Webinar with Presenters: Marc Gillinov, MD, Marc Gerdisch, MD, and Alyson Mehringer, RN discussing the basic principles of Chest Tube Management, the results of a 1 year quality improvement study and the operational perspective from the ICU Nursing Staff.

Blog

Three Practices to Speed Patient Recovery after VAD Implantation

Today, ventricular assist devices (VAD) are routinely used to partially or completely replace the function of a failing heart.(1) While this quantum leap forward is good news for patients with advanced heart failure, there are still significant risks involved – particularly short-term complications that continue to threaten major morbidity. Yet by implementing a few simple but crucial protocols, you can greatly speed recovery, lower the costs of care,…

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Clear Catheter Systems Wins Prestigious International Innovation Award

  2013 “Innovations in Cardiovascular Interventions” Top Prize goes to Medical Device Start-up for PleuraFlow Clear Catheter Systems, Inc., announced today it has won the 2013 Innovations in Cardiovascular Interventions (ICI) Best Start-Up Innovation Award for its medical device, PleuraFlow®, a novel system that optimally evacuates blood and fluid after surgery to speed recovery and improve patient outcomes in the ICU during the initial critical hours after heart…

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Bleeding after heart surgery: Better out than in!

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…

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What’s your Protocol?

Proactive Protocols to Reduce Complications After Cardiac Surgery Improving outcomes and reducing 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 patients recovering. All cardiac surgery patients have some degree of bleeding postoperatively, and chest tubes are used to evacuate this blood from the pleural and/or pericardial spaces.

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The PleuraFlow Active Tube Clearance System Initial Clinical Experience in Adult Cardiac Surgery

Louis P. Perraut, Michel Pellerin, Michel Carrier, Raymond Cartier, Denis Bouchard, Philippe Demers, Edward M. Boyle. Innovations 2012; 7(5):354-358 This initial clincial experience found found that the PleuraFlow system was easily incorporated into the postoperative workflow of managing the drainage of patients after heart surgery. The PleuraFlow system was easily understood by the nurses in the ICU and the use of the device was obvious to learn, efficient,…

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Superior Chest Drainage with an Active Tube Clearance System: Evaluation of a Downsized Chest Tube

As a followup to the previous study, this preclinical study performed in the laboratories of the Cleveland Clinic compared 20 Fr PleuraFlow® ACT Systems to 32 Fr conventional chest tubes. In another head to head comparison in the setting of heavy bleeding,
downsized PleuraFlow systems evacuated significantly more blood from the chest, resulting in significantly less retained blood in the chest cavicty. This is the first time a small diameter tube has not only been found to be equivalent to a larger tube, but in fact superior.

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Improved Drainage with Active Chest Tube Clearance

A preclinical study performed in the laboratories of the Cleveland Clinic compared 32 Fr PleuraFlow® ACT
Systems to 32 Fr conventional chest tubes. In a head to head comparison with a same sized conventional chest
tube in the setting of heavy bleeding, the PleuraFlow evacuated significantly more blood from the chest, resulting
in significantly less retained blood in the chest cavicty.

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