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 surgery.
Year: 2013
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 bleeding subsides.
Improving Your Heart Program’s Bottom Line: Seven Simple Steps to Recoup Lost RBC Costs and Reduce Complications After Heart Surgery
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.
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.
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, and effective.