Sustaining e-health innovations in a complex hospital environment: learning through evidence.

Implementing and sustaining technological innovations in healthcare is a complex process. Commonly, innovations are abandoned due to unsuccessful attempts to sustain and scale-up post implementation. Limited information is available on what characterizes successful e-health innovations and the enabling factors that can lead to their sustainability in complex hospital environments.

Optimizing care of patients undergoing cardiac surgery using a digital platform and a multidisciplinary team approach.

Objective: Restrictions to care access during the pandemic along with the increasing complexity of patients awaiting cardiac surgery provides unique challenges for care delivery. The University of Ottawa Heart Institute has developed a novel multidisciplinary digital platform, the Prehab Automated Follow-Up (AFU) Program, which delivers patient/caregiver teaching regarding risk factor mitigation, tracks patient symptoms, and screens for optimization using best practice guidelines. This study was conducted to quantify patient outcomes following initiation of the AFU Program.

IVR System Use by Patients with Heart Failure: Compliance and Services Utilization Patterns.

Heart failure (HF) is the leading cause of cardiovascular morbidity and health care utilization globally. Much of the cost for HF is related to hospitalization, strategies to decrease cost need to focus on avoiding unnecessary hospital readmission. Interactive voice response (IVR) is an automated telephony system that leverages existing telephone lines to monitor patients post-discharge, for early intervention.

Derivation of Patient-Defined Adverse Cardiovascular and Noncardiovascular Events Through a Modified Delphi Process.

Importance: There is little evidence to support patient-centered outcomes in patients with cardiovascular disease.

Objective: To derive patient-defined adverse cardiovascular and noncardiovascular events (PACE) through a consensus-based process.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This pan-Canadian, consensus-based, qualitative study used an iterative Delphi method to achieve consensus within a 35-member panel consisting of patients with cardiovascular diseases and their caregivers and clinicians.

Derivation and Validation of a Clinical Model to Predict Intensive Care Unit Length of Stay After Cardiac Surgery.

Background Across the globe, elective surgeries have been postponed to limit infectious exposure and preserve hospital capacity for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, the ramp down in cardiac surgery volumes may result in unintended harm to patients who are at high risk of mortality if their conditions are left untreated. To help optimize triage decisions, we derived and ambispectively validated a clinical score to predict intensive care unit length of stay after cardiac surgery.

A Novel Protocol for Very Early Hospital Discharge After STEMI.

Although the incidence of ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) is on the decline, management of patients who present with STEMI continues to require significant health care resources. Earlier hospital discharge in low-risk patients who present with STEMI has been an area of focus in an attempt to reduce health care costs. As a result, discharge within 48-72 hours after successful primary percutaneous coronary intervention has increasingly become routine practice.