Blog

Today, ventricular assist devices (VAD) are routinely used to partially or completely replace the function of a failing heart.1 While this 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 may be able to greatly speed recovery, lower the costs of care, and…

All stakeholders in healthcare want to see improved outcome and reduced costs to maximize patient value. The question is how to get there? As promising new technologies and protocols are innovated and become known, the questions are always the same: “How do we know this works?” “Is it worth it to make the changes in protocols needed to figure this out?” “Is there return on investment given the…

Click here to read Frost & Sullivan’s Press Release. Click here to read ClearFlow’s Press Release. ClearFlow, Inc. is proud to have been recognized with a 2017 Global Frost & Sullivan Award for New Product Innovation. 

Bleeding is common after heart surgery. Patients with bleeding after heart surgery clearly have worse outcomes. But why? Theoretically, if a patient is bleeding and the chest tubes adequately drain the blood from around the heart and lungs while coagulation is restored and the blood products replaced, there should not be much impact on outcomes. But this is clearly not the case. For example in a recent study by Chistensen and…

Chest tubes are used to prevent retained clot around the heart in patients recovering from heart surgery. Chest tubes often fail by clogging, leading to retained blood syndrome.1, 2 Growing evidence suggests that retained blood is one of the most potent triggers for developing Post Operative Atrial Fibrillation (POAF).3 POAF is the most common complication after Cardiac Surgery, leading to longer and more expensive hospital stays, readmissions and…

Recovering from heart surgery for patients is difficult and complicated. Every heart surgery patient requires at least one, and often more chest tubes to evacuate blood from around the heart and lungs in the early hours after cardiac surgery until bleeding ceases. But chest tubes are known to frequently clog, leading to retained blood around the heart and lungs.1 Nearly 1 in 5 patients can be demonstrated to…

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…