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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…

Heart Surgeons are often faced with a dilemma: They put in 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.

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,…

  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…

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…

Bleeding is one of the most common and expensive complications after heart surgery.  When a patient hemorrhages, not only does it impact patient outcomes, the hospital hemorrhages money in un-recouped expenses to manage the ensuing complications.

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.